The fulfilment of Britain's mission in Malaya lay in the establishment of multi-racial politics. This was both a measure of political advancement and a condition of independence. However, schemes to restore the initiative to the locality and to break down ethnic blocs through projects of social engineering and democratisation merely revealed the possibilities of these strategies for communal advancement. The aim of drawing Chinese society in the New Villages into the mainstream of national life was subverted when the government's local allies, the MCA, were implicated in a movement of Chinese cultural resurgence. Resurrected trade unionism became a communal enclave. Increasing economic differentiation within the Malay heartlands presaged a shift from locally based movements of self-improvement to corporatism directed from the centre. Malay political leadership did not merely defend this as a strategy for development, but as a political entitlement, an indissoluble component of Malay identity. In a parallel process, the colonial government's propagation of a ‘Malayan’ national culture was anticipated by a flood of alternative expressions of community and movements of cultural reconstruction. Powerful cultural and political alternatives emerged which refused to conform to the colonial paradigm, and much of the fabric of Malayan social life stood outside of it. These were not to fuse, as the ideologues of the new imperialism had suggested, but to accommodate after a fashion in a social compact, guaranteed in the last resort by the power of the state.