New Village

For other places named "Kampung Baru", see: Kampung Baru.

New Villages (Chinese: 新村 pinyin: xīn cūn; Malay: Kampung Baru), also known as Chinese New Villages (Chinese: 华人新村 pinyin: huá rén xīn cūn), are settlements created during the waning days of British rule over Malaysia in the mid-1950s.

History

The original purpose of the New Villages in Malaysia was to segregate the villagers from the early Malayan Races Liberation Army insurgents, which were led by the Malayan Communist Party, during the Malayan Emergency. It was part of the Briggs Plan, a military plan devised by British General Sir Harold Briggs shortly after his appointment in 1950 as Director of Operations in the anti-communist war in Malaya.

The plan aimed to defeat the communists, who were operating out of rural areas as a guerrilla army, primarily by cutting them off from their sources of support amongst the population. To this end, a massive program of forced resettlement of Malayan peasantry was undertaken, under which about 500,000 people (roughly ten percent of Malaya's population) were eventually removed from the land and housed in guarded camps called "New Villages".