The Briggs Plan is well known, but this chapter shows it instituted much more than a civil–military executive committee system and ‘population control’ through resettlement. Instead it aimed at a broader ‘geodemographic’ control of people and space, including ‘things’ such as food. It intended this to variously weaken insurgent–rural population links, provide ‘cover’ for the popultion to refuse what insurgents asked of them and create killing grounds as it forced insurgents to approach resettlements in more predictble ways. This chapter shows multiple individuals threatening resignation as the staggering scale of the plan – over 1 million were moved – tested people to the limit. It ends with promising signs but also still-high incident levels and rising concern in the wake of the killing of the high commissioner, Sir Henry Gurney, in October 1951. It also reminds us that even as geodemographic control was tightening and the first amenities for the resettled appearing, Briggs’s idea of clearing successive area was going nowhere. The operations were just too short, and too short of covering entire communist committee districts, to stop the MCP regenerating afterwards.

The first months of the Emergency saw chaos and uncertainty as both sides were caught off-guard and scrambled to organise. A combination of MCP policy of intermingling with rural villagers and British policy of exerting ‘pressure’ on the same villagers saw huts burned, people shot running and ‘excesses’ including twenty-four killed at Batang Kali. In effect, rural civilians were caught between MCP ‘terror’ (objectively, if not by intent) and British ‘counter-terror’ and pressure. Government, meanwhile, was gestating more positive measures, so that by the year’s end it was pushing states to start resettlement of villagers and was working with Chinese leaders in the MCA.