 The next High Commissioner was Gerald Templer who is credited by many historians as being the most effective in defeating the MNLA guerrillas.Templer oversaw the finalising of the Briggs' Plan, the British military strategy to defeat Malayan communism by destroying rural villages and imprisoning thousands of ethnic Chinese-Malayans in a system of internment camps called "new villages"s. By early 1952 over 400,000 people (mostly ethnic Chinese) had been imprisoned in New Village internment camps and deprived of all civil rights.Templer then attempted to starve the MNLA out of the jungles by destroying farmland, spraying chemical herbacides from airplanes to destroy crops, and enforcing a food rationing system for Malayan villagers so that they could not share food with MNLA members.