occupation during World War II. During the post-war period, other communist groups active in Sarawak included the Overseas Chinese Youth Association, the Liberation League, and the Sarawak Advanced Youths' Association (SAYA). By 1965, these had coalesced into two main organisations: the North Kalimantan People's Army (Pasukan Rakyat Kalimantan Utara, PARAKU) and the Sarawak People's Guerillas (Pasukan Gerilya Rakyat Sarawak, PGRS). These were collectively referred to by most British and Western sources as the Sarawak Communist Movement or Clandestine Communist Organisation (CCO), which came into existence during the Pontianak Conference in September 1965. According to the historians Vernon L. Porritt and Cheah Boon Kheng, Communist elements were also influential in the Chinese schools during the 1940s. Following the Second World War, Communist elements also infiltrated the Sarawak labour movement and Sarawak's first political party, the predominantly ethnic Chinese Sarawak United People's Party, which was formed in June 1959. In addition, Hsueh Hsih or "Communist indoctrination" groups were formed in Kuching between 1949 and 1950. Two important figures in the Sarawak Communist movement, Weng Min Chyuan and Bong Kee Chok, came from Chung Hua Middle School. On 30 March 1954, pro-Communist students at Kuching Chung Hua Middle School organised a 47-day strike to protest against the school administration's teaching methods and its expulsion of students. Communist elements later spread to the business and farming community, many of whom were parents of these left-wing students. Opposition to Malaysia The Sarawak Communist Movement was also opposed to the formation of Malaysia, a new political federation which had been created by the British to merge their former Southeast Asian territories of Malaya, Singapore, Sarawak, and British North Borneo. Instead, the Sarawak Communists supported and propagated the unification of all Borneo territories under British control to form an independent leftist North Kalimantan state. This idea had originally proposed by A. M. Azahari, leader of the Parti Rakyat Brunei (Brunei People's Party), who had forged links with Sukarno's nationalist movement, together with Ahmad Zaidi, in Java in the 1940s. The North Kalimantan (or Kalimantan Utara) proposal was seen as a post-decolonisation alternative by local opposition against the Malaysia plan. Local opposition throughout the Borneo territories was primarily based on economic, political, historical and cultural differences between the Borneo states and Malaya, as well as the refusal to be subjected to peninsular political domination. According to a British government white paper known as "The Communist Threat to Sarawak",