British authority in Malaya's rural areas had been only tenuously re-established after the surrender of Japan at the end of the Second World War. The British regarded a group of about 500,000 "squatters", largely of Chinese descent, who practised small-scale agriculture, generally lacked legal title to their land, and were largely outside the reach of the colonial administration, as particularly problematic. Many of the Chinese people had been forced to live in isolated communities to avoid being slaughtered by the occupying Japanese.