was banned in July 1948. In response to the Emergency and the mass arrests of its members, the CPM issued a call to its members to revive its disbanded wartime resistance army, the MPAJA, to take up arms again and escape to the jungles. In fact, since late May and early June the communists had been secretly setting up platoons in several states in preparation for an expected British crackdown in September. The sudden declaration of the Emergency in June, however, forced the MCP to hasten its plan, and they appealed to comrades and volunteers to join them in the struggle. The new guerrilla army, now known as the Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA), spent the first year of the Emergency reconsolidating and rearming. At that time, the CPM was in chaos. Its members were dispersed in the jungle and operated without any command structure or central leadership. According to Chin, attacks were being carried out without his approval or knowledge and there was no coordination among units. The guerrillas endured heavy casualties were but made few or no strategic gains in those early months. Chin was desperate to assert control over the MNLA, which had been operating independently since June. It was not until August that some form of central authority was finally set up in the Cameron Highlands, with Chin ordering the guerrillas to adopt Mao Zedong's strategy of establishing liberated zones whenever they drove British forces from an area. However, this strategy failed. British forces continued to hound the guerrillas, who were often forced to retreat deeper into the jungles and disperse into smaller units. This was due to difficulties in resupply. Moreover large units risked being detected and annihilated by British patrols. Furthermore, the CPM was losing civilian support, and lacking material assistance and intelligence, the party suffered. Chin admitted they had wrongly assumed that the people would be willing support his men, as they had done during World War II. When that failed to happen, they resorted to force to satisfy their needs. The CPM and MNLA also suffered under British propaganda, which labelled them "bandits" and "communist terrorists". Old suspicions and assumptions that the CPM had clandestine support from either the CCP or the Soviet Union had, over time, hardened into certainty. Records disclosed after the Cold War ended have finally disproved the convenient lie the British propagated more than half a century ago,