Specter of Acoustic Internationalism: 'Voice of Malayan Revolution' in China, 1969–1981

On 30 June 1981, Voice of Malayan Revolution (Suara Revolusi Malaya), the clandestine radio station of the exiled Malayan Communist Party, was closed down by Deng Xiaoping, marking China’s shift from revolutionary internationalism to economic pragmatism. 

For twelve years, this multilingual broadcast, operated by Malayan revolutionaries and Chinese technicians, voiced in Mandarin, Malay, English, Tamil, and various Chinese dialects, linking dispersed guerrillas and forging affective bonds among listeners across Southeast Asia. 

This paper, as part of a book project on cinematic and media encounters between China, the Third World, and Euro-American Left during the Cold War, traces the Voice of Malayan Revolution as a resonant experiment in what I call 'acoustic internationalism'—a sonic network that transcended colonial, ethnic, and linguistic divides to sustain solidarity amid Cold War fragmentation. 

Radio, as an auditory medium of disembodied intimacy, mediated an alternative public sphere where voices of exile and insurgency could travel farther than bodies. The station’s relocation from Hunan, China to Thailand in 1981 mirrored shifting geopolitical alignments in East and Southeast Asia and reflected the waning of trans-Asian socialist solidarity after the Sino-Soviet split. 

By situating this broadcast within the material and ideological infrastructures that sustained it, this study repositions Cold War media history beyond Euro-American frameworks. It listens instead to the reverberations of socialist sound that once unsettled the region’s postcolonial order—an echo of a vanishing yet still resonant acoustic internationalism.   

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SOAS Centre of South East Asian Studies.