#this one

What am I meant to say to ask like these? I get them quite a lot

Are you asking if I think they're canon? Are you asking if I like them? Are these your headcanons and you're looking for my approval?

As colonial territory extended across Malaya, the frontier of the forest moved inwards in the wake of plantation expansion [...]. A colonial authority secure of its place in the racial and economic hierarchy could afford to appear lenient in the use of discipline and punishment. [...] [But World War II] destabilized the racial hierarchy [...]. [T]he punitive landscape relied on both physical changes and a system of signs that successfully conveyed the lesson to be learnt. [...]

---

[R]oad-blocks, individual households, concentration camps [...] repeated and supported each other through [...] interventions in quotidian details [of daily life] [...]. This strategy of purifying delineated spaces of political contagion and then linking up the purified spaces became a central plank of the [model] [...]. Referring to squatters who were suspected of helping the Communists, [British] General Briggs said, ‘You can kill mosquitoes in your house with a spray gun, but they'll soon be replaced by reinforcements if you don't sterilize the stagnant water pools where they breed.’

---

The state metaphorically constructed the forest as an alien space through its policy of segregating rural dwellers, mainly the Chinese, from the forest by resettling them in fenced-in compounds that were euphemistically described as New Villages. [...] [Squatters'] homes, livestock and crops [were] destroyed. [...] Through a series of textual, visual and legislative practices, the forest and New Villages were delineated as moral representations. [...]

The Anglo-Java Rubber Company reported that it had regrouped all its workers into two areas surrounded by barbed wire fences for 3300 and 1200 yards, respectively. [...] Emergency regulations forbade workers from taking food out of estates [...].

By the end of the Emergency, the British had resettled almost 600,000 Chinese and another 150,000 Indians, the latter under the estate regrouping program. Together, these accounted for almost 25% of the Malayan population.

---

The colonial state fixed people in space through elaborate inventories to establish presences and absences [...]. Emergency regulations put in place on 13 July 1948 made finger-printing and identification cards mandatory for anyone over 12. [...]

During the Emergency, household residents' inventories were pasted outside every house, and random house-to-house searches by the police or army encouraged a self-disciplining society. [...]

---

More effective than the grisly exhibits in controlling large numbers of people were the moral representations of space constructed through a chequerboard of black, grey and white spaces that had to be conquered and disciplined as part of the territory of the state [...]. Along with the curfew, residents of this area were restricted in the amount of goods they could buy, store, move and consume, and their movements by day and night and hours of business were circumscribed. The transformation into a white area would be accomplished when the local population had proven themselves good colonial subjects [...].

The best publicized incidence of curfew was the town of Tanjong Malim. The town was punished for not providing information to state forces on [...] strikes [...].

A 22-h curfew was imposed and rice rations were cut in half for their ‘cowardly silence’. [...] High Commisioner Gerald Templer ordered the rice ration in Tanjong Malim cut from 3.5 katis per adult to 3 and 2.5 katis for each child up to 12 years. [...] The result of punishing 20,000 people was the arrest of [merely] three sympathisers [...].

---

Mass detention was institutionalized in 1949 under Regulation 17(D). The strategy of taking sites of contestation and turning them into moral representations is exemplified by Tras. On 7 November 1951 the population of Tras, Pahang were detained on suspicion of having cooperated with the Communists [...]. Two thousand people, mostly old men, women and children were detained because five women and 15 men were suspected of being involved [...]. Residents' belongings were sold off for $3.5 million. [...]

The villagers of Permatang Tinggi in the Bukit Mertajam district of Province Wellesley were punished [...]. Sixty-two villagers were sent to detention camp and 21 were deported. The village then was destroyed as a mark of state vengeance for the murder. The villagers were also forced to pay a fine of $250 per shop and $150 per house under Emergency Regulation 17DA and their belongings confiscated and auctioned. Six months later the villagers were moved back to the old village and wired in. The Government then told the villagers that the past would be forgotten and they could now prosper [...].

---

From the point of view of the colonial state, the impact of the black and white areas was mainly psychological rather than practical. The declaration of Rembau and Port Dickson as white allowed the British to emphasize that one in seven Malayans was now free. [...]

The transformation of an area from black to white began at the coast and moved inland, or at micro-scale, began close to an urban area and moved towards the edge of the forest. The strategy of areas being recategorized from black to white was a metaphorical equivalent of territorialization, and recategorizations were accompanied by maps of the area to fix the images in people's minds.

---