3 - The Nanyang Revolution and the Malayan Nation, 1929–1930

Summary

The establishment of the Malayan “national” party and the emergence of the discourse of a Malayan nation through a translation slippage of the word minzu (nation, nationality, people) coincided with a growing need for a Malayan identity among the Chinese in Malaya. Alongside the emerging sense of a local Malayan Chinese identity among intellectuals and a growing anxiety among Chinese about the Chinese identity of their children, these trends led to the effective dual Malayan and Chinese identity of MCP members. For the MCP, the unintended consequence of the Comintern’s activity was the discursive foundation of the Malayan nation through the establishment of a national party and the promotion of the Malayan revolution led by the MCP, which consisted of Chinese immigrants along with a small number of Malays. In the same time period, concerns about political rights in other European and American colonies in Southeast Asia shaped Chinese political participation in indigenous nationalist projects and their identities vis-à-vis local populations, such as in the Philippines. Malay concepts of national belonging in Southeast Asian colonies did not accommodate an immigrant population, unlike the Comintern idea of an internationalist nation.

Background

In Southeast Asia, indigenous nationalists adopted the Western concept of nation-states. The nation-states there had also been shaped by the geopolitical limits of colonial and precolonial polities as well as by the colonial concepts of boundaries and colonial ethnic policies.¹ During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the exclusion and xenophobia generated by increasing Chinese migration to Southeast Asia and the Pacific region fostered the nationalism of the host countries and helped strengthen the idea of territorial borders.² British Malaya was not an exception. While the idea of a Malayan nation was first promoted by the British government, immigrants did not have political rights in that nation.

British Malaya came under colonial control between 1874 and 1919. A mass migration of Chinese laborers to the Malay Peninsula began after Britain imposed its rule in the western Malay states in 1874 to pacify feuds among Chinese tin mine owners.³ These owners benefited from the British takeover,⁴ but violence by Chinese secret societies led to a British ban on such organizations beginning in 1890, including on the GMD in Malaya (1925) and in Singapore (1930). Noncompliant Straits Settlement Chinese community leaders were deported, Chinese were denied their Chinese political rights as “aliens,” and re-Sinicization through Chinese-language education and the press of the Chinese government was restricted.⁵ In contrast, the British recruited Malays into lower administrative ranks, protected Malay land rights, and preserved Malay peasant customs.⁶

The Chinese in Malaya viewed such actions as oppressive, and leaders of commercial, clan, and regional associations therefore promoted Chinese political rights. The Chinese dominated the cities of the Malay Peninsula and comprised the majority of the population in most of the states. According to the 1921 census, nearly half of the Malayan population, around 3,358,000 people, was Indian (14.2 percent) or Chinese (35 percent), and in 1931, the shares increased to 16 percent and 39 percent, respectively.⁷ At this time, 65 percent of Chinese in Malaya worked in tin mines, small rubber holdings, and farms, while 75 percent of Indians worked on European rubber estates.⁸

Malays felt “left behind” in their world during the colonial period, invaded by foreign capital, goods, and labor, and they were alarmed by the rise in Chinese immigration.⁹ Toynbee famously wrote in 1931 that Malaya was destined to become “a Chinese province by peaceful penetration.”¹⁰ In these circumstances, debates took place regarding the creation of a Malay nation based on race, descent, and land rights (bangsa Melayu). Newspapers promoted the spirit of Malay unification and the erosion of boundaries dividing the Malay community, and Malay intellectuals talked about the crisis of Malay Muslim society and promoted “the values of rationalism and egalitarianism.”¹¹ In the 1930s, Malay newspapers were filled with articles discussing service to the bangsa (nation). Warta Bangsa, the first issue of which was published in 1930, declared that its goal was to “raise up” the Malay race. The bangsa excluded non-Malays, though it was not based on Islam. To counter the rise of pan-Islamic sentiments, the British government supported the cultivation of a Malay identity on which the creation of a bangsa community was contingent.¹² Originally, the Malay sense of identity evolved around kerajaan, a community oriented toward a royal ruler, the raja. After World War I, the issue of descent came to the forefront, as Malays refused to recognize the right of the Peranakan Chinese, Indians, and Arabs to serve as representatives on the Legislative Councils of the Malay States and of the Straits Settlements in light of the economic gap between Malays and non-Malays. At the same time, Malays were reluctant to participate in politics because of the disapproval of the Malay elite and the British authorities. In 1931, a comment by Penang Chinese leader Lim Cheng Yan that the Chinese community had become inseparable from Malaya sparked a debate in the Malay press, which created a sense of solidarity in the Malay community. The Malay press discussed bangsa Melayu and argued against the historical legitimacy of the term Malaya.¹³ For many Malays, the term Malayan invoked the threat of immigrant domination.¹⁴

As a consequence of the Great Depression in Malaya, the world’s foremost producer of tin and rubber, both the new wave of poor Chinese migrants who had no citizenship rights in the colony and the more affluent locally born Chinese were hit hard. Not only did the economic depression and British protectionist policies undermine Chinese economic power in Malaya but the British government also introduced legislation limiting Chinese migration. For immigrants, it became crucial to become a part of the “Malayan nation” promoted by the British government and to have the legal status of locals in order to gain political and landowning rights as well as to decrease the risk of deportation.

The Founding of the MCP

An independent Nanyang party was formed in 1930 through the initiative of the Nanyang Provisional Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in Singapore, which became the core of the newly established MCP.¹⁵ The Comintern policy of creating national parties and fostering a world revolution based on local conditions¹⁶ was related to several factors: the indigenization trend in the CCP, a growing tendency for Malayan Chinese to see advantages in identifying with Malaya, and a sense among Chinese intellectuals of an identity independent of China.

Chinese communists in Singapore and Malaya hoped that the establishment of the MCP would help expand their organizational network, saying, “[t]he CP of [the] Malaya Peninsula can help the organization in those districts where the communist party has not been formed.”¹⁷ Since the work of Nanyang Chinese organizations was insufficiently active for the organization of a new party, in consultation with the CC CCP in Guangdong, Chinese communists decided to first reestablish party organizations and then to revive party work. Because of this decision and because of arrests, their conference was delayed for more than a year. However, twenty individuals eventually attended the third conference of the Nanyang party, the MCP founding conference, from April 22 to 23, 1930. Eleven of these individuals were arrested on April 29, including the secretary of the party, the secretary of the labor union, and a member of the Central Committee.¹⁸

Two Comintern envoys, Fu Daqing and Ho Chi Minh, the head of the Comintern’s office in Hong Kong in 1930 – who was also possibly the head of the Southern Bureau of the CCP with jurisdiction over the Nanyang – presided over the conference.¹⁹ Among other founders were Li Guangyuan (黎光远), Wu Qing (吴清), Secretary Wei Zongzhou (魏宗周),²⁰ Lin Qingchong (林庆充), Wang Yuebo (王月波), Chen Shaochang(陈绍昌), Pang Qinchang, and Lee Chay-heng. The standing committee of MCP members included Wu Qing, Fu Daqing, and Li Guangyuan. All were predominantly Hainanese and in their twenties.²¹ Also in attendance was a CYL representative from Siam.²² Famous writer Ai Wu, who had joined a communist cell in Burma in 1928, missed the meeting because the ship on which he was traveling was placed under quarantine.²³

The establishment of the MCP was under double supervision, that of both “the central committee and K,” likely “Kvok” (Nguyen Ai Quoc, or Ho Chi Minh) or the Comintern, who decided the political line in the Nanyang. The representative of the Far Eastern Bureau (FEB), that is, Ho Chi Minh, chaired the conference.²⁴ Ho was concerned about the CCP’s domination in mainland Southeast Asia over Vietnamese communist networks and sought to balance this out with the Comintern’s authority. He had decided to establish his Indochinese party under Comintern jurisdiction a month earlier so as to exclude the influence of the CCP’s Singapore branch, which by 1930 was attempting to lead communist organizations in Annam (central Vietnam), Indochina, and Siam on behalf of the Comintern. Then, possibly to counter the influence of the Vietnamese, the NPC decided to hold a reorganization meeting as soon as possible, without waiting for NPC inspector “Comrade Li”²⁵ to return from Siam and Indochina, citing that it was running out of money, apparently hoping for Comintern subsidies. Once the MCP had been established, Ho proposed a joint three- to five-member committee of the CCP, the Annamese party, and the Comintern’s FEB in order to foster cooperation between the Yunnan and Tonkin sections, Hong Kong and Annam, and the Annamese working in China. Despite Ho formally proposing cooperation among the Vietnamese, the CCP, and the Comintern, his suggestions ran contrary to Li Lisan’s proposal to keep Indochinese seamen in China under the guidance of the CCP (see Chapter 2). Ho was worried that the Chinese communists in “the secretariat of Nanyang” considered the Philippines, Indochina, Siam, Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies to be under their leadership. Ho, however, did not hesitate to instruct the MCP to build independent parties in Siam, Borneo, and Sumatra at the MCP’s founding meeting. Six weeks prior to this meeting, as the FEB was planning “the conference of [the] communist organization of Malaya,” Ho approached the FEB in Shanghai with some suggestions regarding future strategies. As a result, the Comintern decided to dispatch Ho to Singapore together with Moscow-trained Chinese representative Fu Daqing, who had been involved in communist organizations in Malaya since the mid-1920s.²⁶

Ideas about Vietnamese and Chinese responsibility for the emancipation of the peoples of Southeast Asia can be traced to regional imaginations, not unlike the inter-polity relations of the tributary system of dynastic times. With the influence of social Darwinist ideas, these nostalgic visions were enhanced with new force. Further reinforcement for these ideas came in the form of Comintern-promoted internationalism. Ho Chi Minh, who was familiar with the problem of embedding a predominantly Hainanese communist organization in Siam in the 1920s,²⁷ reprimanded the Chinese communists for not learning Malay. Like the Chinese, Vietnamese communists also sought to indigenize their revolution, and Ho presented himself as a role model, as he had learned French and English while working as a migrant laborer in London.²⁸

The MCP’s Malayan Nation (Post-1930)

Like the CCP, the newborn MCP emerged as a text-focused party that spent much time producing, interpreting, and disseminating written material and that was aptly described by the British as a “paper movement.” From October to November 1931, for example, police in Singapore seized a total of 4,716 copies of various documents.²⁹ The MCP’s efforts to become “international” were based on Comintern texts as a means of communication and of bonding with non-Chinese. In this multilingual community, there were clear slippages in meaning between different languages. The mechanism for these slippages was twofold, conceptual and social. As speakers of different languages interpreted authoritative texts and key words using the conceptual training available to them, a key word’s pragmatic definition (the change in the meaning of a key word reflected in its actual use) joined with the changed social experience of the text’s writers and readers to produce different meanings for the same words. I take inspiration from Koselleck’s Begriffsgeschichte to connect conceptual history and social history.³⁰

Shifts in the meaning of one particular key word, minzu, came in conjunction with the changed social experience of Chinese migrant identification with Malaya and created the basis for the MCP’s formulation of its idea of a form of Malayan nationalism inclusive of immigrants. The genealogy of the word minzu, used to connote the Comintern concept of “national,” can be traced to Sun Yatsen’s use of both minzu and guojia (country) as translations of the English word nation when referring to China. Both the GMD and the CCP used minzu in this dual meaning as “nation” and “nationality.” Multiple meanings of minzu as “ethnic,” “people,” “nation,” and “nationality” are reflected in a CCP statement from 1929: “The national problem of the Nanyang – the nations [minzu] in the Nanyang are very complex.”³¹ In MCP discourse, a Chinese term meaning “nation,” “nationality,” “race,” “ethnic group,” and “national,” minzu, came to mean “Malayan nation.”³² These multiple meanings resulted in a semantic slippage when the Comintern embarked on establishing a Malayan national party in a country that only existed in relation to the British colonial concept of Malaya, meaning the Malay Peninsula. Point seventeen of the twenty-one requirements for official acceptance as a Comintern section stated that an applicant party should be named a “party of a country” (partiia etoi strany).³³ By adding the attribute “Malayan” to “nation” (i.e., minzu), the Comintern reinforced the concept of a Malayan country that was territorially based on British Malaya.

The Chinese communists in the Nanyang, however, imagined another national Malayan party, a federation of communist parties organized along ethnic lines. There were several reasons for that. For one, as discussed in the previous chapter, this was likely based on the model that originated in the multiethnic context of the United States. The CCP understood the word minzu to mean “people,” probably also because the communist cells in mainland Southeast Asia were organized according to ethnicity, differentiating, for instance, Chinese from Vietnamese.³⁴ Since 1927, the predominately Chinese party’s base had presented a problem for the “relationship between the revolutionary parties of the other peoples” and was hard to solve without organizing parties of “various peoples” separately.³⁵ Another possible factor was the reality of ethnic division within industries, which impacted the makeup of trade unions.³⁶

Since 1929, the CCP had intended to unify Chinese ethnic cells across the Nanyang into one party.³⁷ In 1930, to solve the problem of the party’s focus on Chinese communities, the MCP members-to-be suggested “[establishing] a nucleus among each people [i.e., ethnic community], in order to establish an independent party of each people.”³⁸ In other words, the Nanyang communists interpreted the Comintern’s principle of national parties as being based on ethnic groups. The MCP’s political resolution in English stated the following:

In view of the mistake that the system of [the] Malay party belongs to [the] Chinese party, some members insist to organise an unity party embracing all people in Malaya. This organisational line is also contradictory to the organisational principle of [an] international party, for the unit of organisation is people. Each native people should organise a national party … To organise a unity party consisting of various peoples is incorrect.³⁹

This statement was incompatible with the Comintern’s policy of having one communist party per country. Over this paragraph, a Comintern cadre wrote Sovershenno neverno (“Absolutely wrong”). Elsewhere, the FEB noted that “[t]he idea of creating several Communist parties based on the [different] nationalities in Malaya must be energetically combated”; in the Malayan state, there was to be only one party, which would include “workers of all nationalities.”⁴⁰

In CCP documents from 1928–1929, the term Malaya was not used, and there was thus no correlation with “national.”⁴¹ However, starting with the MCP’s founding conference minutes, the terms Malaya party and Nanyang party were used interchangeably and had the meaning of “national party.” The goal of the MCP’s revolution was to achieve “a united front of the oppressed peoples” and to organize “the Democratic Republic by free union among the various people of [the] Nanyang,” a concept that, in the same paragraph, was termed the “Democratic Republics of the Malay States.”⁴² The idea of a soviet federation made sense in Malaya – and in the Nanyang – with its multiple minzu, which, for the Comintern, translated into the Russian natsionalnost’ (nationality).⁴³ Following the Comintern’s directives, the MCP now conceived of the Malayan nation as encompassing all Malayan ethnic groups in the fashion of the multiethnic Soviet federation. Thus, the Comintern gave Chinese communists in the Nanyang the discursive tools to imagine Malaya, consisting at the time of several sultanates under British dominion, as a nation-state.

As a result of different understandings of the word minzu by the CCP and the Comintern, a communist organization that was built according to people became the basis of a countrywide communist party of a nonexistent nation. With the equating of the ethnic Chinese party with the national Malayan party, the Chinese communists were to lead Malaya’s oppressed peoples to colonial liberation and nationhood on behalf of the Malayan nation and the Malayan Revolution. It was this slippage that made Malaya a territorialized nation and a country in MCP discourse, since, like the Comintern, the MCP used national to refer to the jurisdictional space of the party, so “national” meant “Malayan.” Before the establishment of the MCP, the Chinese communists imagined the place where they were, the Nanyang and the Malayan Peninsula, as a place inhabited by different ethnic groups (minzu). By promoting a national (i.e., Malayan) party and a Malayan Revolution, the Comintern conformed to the nascent idea of a national Malayan identity among Chinese immigrant communists and their jurisdiction over both the Nanyang and Malaya.

The boundaries between the Malayan party and the Nanyang party remained ambiguous. From 1928, the twentieth plenum of the CCP Central Executive Committee in Guangdong, in accordance with the Comintern line, decided to transform the special committees of Siam, Annam, Burma, and the Indian islands into the Siam Committee, the Annam Committee, and the Communist Party of the Nanyang Peoples.⁴⁴ In 1928, the NPC plenum decided that the communists had to start a “national movement” in the Nanyang so as to attract Malays and Indians to the Chinese party organization and to accept the Comintern’s leadership.⁴⁵ The party of the Nanyang was to become independent when the parties of various nations in the Nanyang were united into a general organization.⁴⁶ Since 1929, the CCP had planned that the “Communist Party of the Nanyang Nationalities” (Kommunisticheskaia partiia nan’ianskikh narodnostei) would include the larger territory of the Indian islands, meaning the Malay Archipelago, Burma, and the Annam and Siam committees.⁴⁷

At the MCP’s founding conference, the Nanyang party was to be renamed the Nanyang Various Peoples Communists’ Joint Secretariat as a transitional organization for “the communist party in the various oppressed peoples of [the] Nanyang” and would include a Malay communist party or a “Communist Committee of [the] Malay Peninsula.”⁴⁸ Comintern documents before 1930 also demonstrate that the Nanyang was termed alternatively as the Malay Archipelago, the Malay states, or Indonesia.⁴⁹ As early as 1918, Nanyang had been translated into English as “Malaysia” by the first “area studies” institution in China, at Ji’nan University, and Comintern translators also translated Nanyang as “Malaya.”⁵⁰ The Comintern confirmed this conception of the Nanyang as a Malay region by assigning responsibility for movements in Indonesia, Siam, and Burma to the MCP in 1934.⁵¹

In these uncertain boundaries of the Nanyang, populated by various peoples, we recognize the pattern of Sun Yatsen’s idea of a Chinese nation comprising multiple peoples. In 1912, in his inaugural address as provisional president of the Republic of China, Sun Yatsen spoke of the future republic as uniting all territories of the former Qing empire and all five ethnicities (zu) – Manchu, Han, Mongol, Hui, and Tibetan – in one nation (yiren), which would be the “unity of the nation.”⁵² The similarity of the multiethnic conditions in Malaya and in the Chinese empire, now a republic, in both of which the Chinese were the dominant minzu, rendered the application of the Comintern’s principle of internationalism logical.

In 1930, the MCP, which primarily consisted of CCP members, subsequently changed its idea of a national party in accordance with the Comintern idea of an ethnically inclusive party in order to acquire Comintern recognition and funding. However, because of the MCP’s inability to involve non-Chinese in the organization, the de facto ethnic mode of organization of workers and nationalist movements continued throughout the 1930s. The founding conference, as in 1929, thus criticized the party for its continuing failure to indigenize, accusing it of not understanding “the revolutionary task in Nanyang”⁵³ and of not adapting “to the practical life of Malaya.”⁵⁴ The Nanyang comrades recognized that Malay natives should participate in the revolution in the Nanyang, but because of a lack of money and cadres, this recognition did not go further than discussions about the tactics of the party, educational classes, and the establishment of party publications.⁵⁵ The party did not adapt to Malay conditions because it consisted of Chinese immigrants and because of the “patriotism of Chinese toiling masses in Malaya,” as well as a lack of investigation into the conditions in Malaya and a lack of special instructions from the CC CCP to the “Malay party.” The way to fix this, the MCP imagined, was by establishing organizations consisting of members of different nationalities.⁵⁶ The indigenization of the MCP, which had been previously promoted by the GMD and the CCP in 1929, was now also promoted by the Comintern.

The MCP’s indigenization ran through the rhetoric of internationalism and world revolution. The MCP thus promoted the liberation of Malaya through a Malayan Revolution, which would contribute to the world revolution: “Comrades! The III congress [the founding meeting] has entrusted us with the full responsibility for the revolutionary movement of the Malay Peninsula. We must organize the Malayan proletariat and poor peasantry into a new army of the world revolution for the emancipation of all oppressed peoples of [the] Malay [P]eninsula.”⁵⁷

Indigenizing the Chinese Revolution through the Malayan Nation, Advancing Malay Civilization through the Chinese Revolution

In 1930 the Comintern promoted the mobilization of Malaya’s three major ethnic communities through the MCP, calling for support for the Chinese and Indian Revolutions and “the liberation of Malaya.”⁵⁸ Malaya was a unique place to promote slogans of support for the Chinese and Indian Revolutions that would also benefit the Malayan and world revolutions, since in 1931 Indians and Chinese comprised such a sizable proportion of Malaya’s population. In the MCP texts, this translated into the “emancipation of the oppressed Malay nationalities” (Malai bei yapo de minzu jiefang) or the “the people of Malaya” (Malai de renmin), who consisted of “complex nationalities” (fuza de minzu).⁵⁹ The MCP argued that it had to organize Malay and Indian workers to address the low political awareness of the Chinese masses (qunzhong de zhengzhi shuiping jiaodi), which manifested itself in an immigrant mentality (yimin de xinli). In the Darwinian world of revolution, the establishment of a workers and peasants’ state (gongnong de guojia) would bring liberation to the Malayan nation (Malai minzu duli) or “the people of Malaya” (Malai de minzhong), rendered in English translation as “Malaya.” It would also help overcome economic backwardness and would bring the Malay “civilization”⁶⁰ to a higher stage of development (xiang zhao geng gao de wenming fazhan).⁶¹

For the MCP, colonial emancipation meant “civilizational progress”: “The British often say in Malaya that peoples of the East are of the second sort [xiadeng de dongxi], regardless of whether they are educated elites or not, and they do so because otherwise the peoples of the East will stand up, work on their own country [jiajin ziji guojia de gongzuo], and overcome imperialist domination, and their civilization will advance [wenming jinbu].”⁶² Propaganda rhetorically defending the Soviet Union, which had been “economically and culturally backward” but in ten years had surpassed any “so-called civilized country,” made sense because it offered a model of civilizational breakthrough.⁶³

Internationalism was intrinsic to indigenization through these discourses of aid to the Chinese and Indian Revolutions for the sake of the Malayan Revolution and ultimately the world revolution. Because Malaya’s production depended on a labor influx from these two countries, revolutions in China and India became the first conditions for the emancipation of the Malay nation (Malai minzu jiefang), the MCP argued. To help the Indian and Chinese Revolutions and to expand the movement in Malaya, the MCP needed to organize Chinese and Indian workers. The revolution in India was important because it would help to spread revolution in other British colonies and to bring down British imperialism.⁶⁴ The Comintern thus provided a new international justification for the internationalism of the Chinese Revolution of Sun Yatsen by merging Chinese nationalism and Asianism together in the MCP’s Malayan nationalism.

The Comintern responded to MCP initiatives⁶⁵ with a directive to promote these two revolutions. In the earliest such document, dated December 1930, the Comintern recommended that the MCP promote support for the Chinese and Indian Revolutions among their respective ethnic communities and use different slogans in each. The rationale was that the emancipation of Malaya would help the emancipation of China and India, which would be beneficial for the Malayan Revolution. This attitude also provided a rhetorical tool to attract members of the Chinese community and, most important, on behalf of and to the benefit of the national liberation of Malaya. For instance, the Comintern suggested that among the Chinese population, the slogan that the emancipation of Malaya would help the emancipation of China had to be used, as the same imperialists who oppressed China also oppressed Malaya. The same was promoted among Hindu workers regarding Indian emancipation: “You must tell the native workers that the emancipation of Malaya can be put into practice only through the united front of all toiling masses of the Malay state regardless of nationalities.”⁶⁶ The FEB suggested that the MCP explain to the native Malay workers that they should fight not for the lowering of wages among Chinese and Indian workers to their level but for the opposite.⁶⁷

As had Li Lisan in the past, the Comintern criticized the MCP, saying it was a group of Chinese immigrants who were living “by the interests of the Chinese movement” and who were “separated from the life of the indigenous strata of toiling Malays” and Malaya-born “indigenous Chinese” because of their “attempt to mechanistically graft the methods and some slogans of the Chinese movement in Malaya.”⁶⁸ The Comintern felt that the MCP was still “more of a CCP organization … working among the Chinese workers who fled from China, rather than an independent party of Malaya States.”⁶⁹ The ECCI considered the MCP to be “the Singapore group” and recommended that the FEB connect with it and “establish leadership over its activity, and try to convert it and use it for the establishment of the communist party of the Malay archipelago, including Malay, Indian, and Chinese (including indigenous) workers,” who would be able to lead the revolutionary movement of Malaya. The FEB was to help the MCP prepare Chinese, Malay, and Indian cadres, who would be able to organize an independent MCP and who “would help the communist movement in Indonesia to form.”⁷⁰

Moreover, the Comintern pointed out, “[t]he proletarian movement in Singapore can play a huge role in the agitation and organization of the countries that surround it.” The FEB continued, “[i]t is necessary to create an organizational network through the whole country of Malaya states. You already have an organizational basis in the Chinese communist group. Now it is necessary without delay to make every effort that these Chinese communists no longer exist like a group of Chinese emigrants, living with their minds and hearts solely upon events in China and mechanically reproducing all such [phenomena] in the Malaya states.” The Comintern refused to recognize the established MCP as the Malayan communist party and suggested that the “communist party in the Malaya States” should be established on the basis of the preliminary committee that the Nanyang communists had established in April 1930.⁷¹

The Comintern’s vision echoed the same method of indigenization of immigrant communist networks that Ho Chi Minh had promoted in Indochina and that the GMD had advocated in Malaya. This indigenization was rooted in the civilizing aspirations of immigrant communists in Southeast Asia. The revolution offered a way of localizing the Chinese communist organization in Malayan society, as the MCP was eager to build a cross-ethnic alliance. When the party distributed its pamphlets during the celebration of a communist festival in “Hindus” and “Malayan” languages, it reported that “the native masses seemed very pleased” to have revolutionaries among themselves as well, while the Chinese were also pleased that Malays and Indians “[were] with them now.”⁷² However, despite aloof slogans and an emphasis on non-Chinese membership numbers, it was obvious that non-Chinese membership was negligible.

Malays in the MCP

Although membership at the founding conference was reported as 1,500 as well as 5,000 labor union members, the party had only 1,130 party members (including five Malays) and more than 4,250 members of communist-influenced red trade unions in October 1930. The conference itself included only one Malay and one representative from the Netherlands East Indies.⁷³ However, the term Malay may be deceptive, for by April 1, 1930, of six Malays arrested because of their association with the Chinese communists, five (Ahmed Baiki bin Suile, Ali Majid, Jamal Ud Din, Emat, alias Abdul Hamid, and Haji Mohamed bin Hashim) came from Sumatra, Sulawesi, and Java, and it is likely that the sixth, Salleh Bin Sapi, did as well.⁷⁴ Despite its alleged goals, the MCP was still said to be exclusively Chinese (apart from one Indian) and appeared to have “no plan to involve non-Chinese other than vulgar conversation and politeness,” because of difficulties with their different “language and custom.”⁷⁵ The discrepancy in the documents sent to the Comintern, which report an MCP membership of 10 percent “Malaysians and Indians,” may have been because the CC in Singapore relied on reports from local cells, which were often intercepted and therefore irregular. Some MCP envoys claimed that they themselves did not have sufficient knowledge of party membership to make accurate reports.⁷⁶ Furthermore, when the CC and other local organizations sent envoys to Shanghai in 1930 as MCP representatives in hopes of gaining Comintern funding and recognition of autonomy,⁷⁷ there was a clear benefit to show growing recruitment of non-Chinese, which had been a condition stipulated by the Comintern. It is evident, however, that these estimates were exaggerated, since other sources (see Table 3.1) show no improvement.

Table 3.1 Non-Chinese members in communist organizations in Malaya

	MCP	Red labor unions
1930	5 Indians	300 Indians and Malays (at least 30 Malays and 220 Indians)
	Malays: 2 members and 1 candidate, possibly including a former PKI member, Subajio; 1 CC member and 5 CC candidates
March 1931	Total: 1,220	Indians: 350 Malays: 30, as well as 72 Javanese Total: 5,830
September 1931		1,220 Indians and Malays Total: 8,175
December 1931	Indians: 28 Malays: 17, as well as 1 Javanese	Indians: 180 Malays: at least 700 In Singapore, 10 percent Malays, Tamils, and Javanese, 9 Javanese and 57 Indians “under influence”78

Obviously, those few Malays were not very visible in the MCP, since in 1931 Comintern envoy Ducroux discovered that in the MCP, there was “no single Malay or Indian, but Indians were in the Malaya trade unions.”⁷⁹ Overall, there were more non-Chinese in the AIL.⁸⁰ However, the MCP had no language skills and asked the Comintern for the help of the Javanese and Indian parties, who could send Chinese, Indians, or Javanese from the Kommunisticheskii universitet trudiashchikhsia Vostoka (KUTV), and of Comintern cadres who knew different languages to help recruit Indians and Malays into communist organizations.⁸¹

The MCP’s difficulties in engaging Malays were not surprising, given the typically condescending attitudes that perpetuated European nineteenth-century stereotypes.⁸² An MCP report stated that: “All aborigines are lazy. Though they have fertile land, they do not persevere to till it but spend their fatal time in sexual abuses, idleness and superstition.”⁸³ Ho Chi Minh, in his report, described the MCP’s arrogance eloquently:

Chauvinism and provincialism: They thought that being Chinese, they must work only for China, and only with the Chinese. They looked upon the natives as inferior and unnecessary people. There were no contacts, no relations between the Chinese members and the native masses. The consequences of that exclusiveness are that when they need the cooperation of the natives they find no one or find only mediocre elements.⁸⁴

For example, the MCP decided that the Malay and Hindu comrades had an “infantile education” and therefore could not be trusted with the press to publish Malay- and “Hindu”-language propaganda.⁸⁵ Some party members in Selangor, Singapore, and Malacca “[sabotaged] the work on the grounds that Indian and Malayan workers were too backward and [were] not receptive to revolutionary ideas.”⁸⁶ However, the CC MCP in 1930 was critical of such attitudes toward Malays and insisted that though Malays were not revolutionary because of the current British policy of harmonization, they still needed to be dragged out of their present economic condition and their civilizational level had to be raised: “A Malay workers and peasants’ state can only be established by Malayan workers and peasants.”⁸⁷ Malay intellectuals, in the view of the MCP, lacked nationalism and collaborated with the British government, which destroyed their “conception of independence and emancipation.”⁸⁸

Member of the MCP, artist and musician Zhang Xia (张霞) also described Malays as lazy and as having low cultural levels (landuo, wenhua shuiping you di) in contrast to the industrious, intelligent, and patient (qinlao, naiku, congying) Chinese.⁸⁹ The Weekly Herald (Xingqi daobao), in a 1935 article about the British colonization of Malaya, reported that the British and the Malays had different cultural levels (wenhua chengdu buyi) and that the Malayan national movement (minzu yundong) comprised Chinese. The article included a cartoon of “drunken and stupefied” colonial people sleeping in the middle of the day, which illustrates the Nanjing GMD government’s outlook on the “oppressed” peoples of the Nanyang, an outlook the MCP shared.⁹⁰

Indonesian communists continued to attempt to organize Malays in the Malayan Peninsula in 1928–1930, mostly unsuccessfully, but Alimin and Musso allegedly organized a Malay section of the AIL and built connections with Indonesians and Malays studying in Cairo. In Lenggeng in Negeri Sembilan, there was a Sumatran Islamic reformist movement, Kaum Muda, which was connected with the communists in Indonesia.⁹¹ Indonesian Comintern agents were also unsuccessful in recruiting Malays into the MCP. Similarly, a group of Chinese sent by the Nanyang party to Indonesia in 1930 failed to generate links to the PKI. Fearing arrest in Singapore, PKI leader Alimin went to Shanghai in 1931, where he worked among Malay and Javanese seamen until arrests decimated the local Comintern bureau in June 1931. It was hoped that Tan Malaka, whom the Comintern discovered in Shanghai, where he had been in hiding since 1927, would be an effective organizer, but he was arrested en route in Hong Kong.⁹² In Malaya itself, the MCP had no connection with the short-lived Belia Malaya (Young Malaya) (1930–1931), established by Malay student teachers at Sultan Idris Training College, including Ibrahim Yaacob, inspired by the idea of unity with Indonesia in a greater Malaysia Raya (but since 1926 they had contacts with Alimin and Sutan Djenain, a member of the CC MCP and of the Malayan Racial Emancipation League, respectively).⁹³ This apparent gap in communication is significant, given that in 1937 Yaacob and his Young Malay Union (Kesatuan Melayu Muda) (KMM) were credited with creating the discourse of an inclusive multiethnic Malayan nation.⁹⁴

In 1934, when the Comintern requested that the MCP send Malays to Moscow for training, the MCP responded that it was difficult to persuade the five Malay comrades (Ma ji) they had found in Melaka and Selangor to leave their families even for one week. One comrade in Singapore was sufficiently qualified to conduct propaganda among Malays (Malai minzu gongzuo de zhongxin): “The long-term education of Malay comrades [Malaiya ji tongzhi] is very needed. However, they do not want to come to us; we can only go to the locality and teach there and after, perhaps, can gather a training group of Malay comrades.” A lack of help from local organizations was also blamed for the lack of Malay involvement (in Sembilan), and many MCP members considered efforts in this direction to be futile.⁹⁵

However, with overall MCP membership in decline by 1934 due to arrests, one letter mentions only seven Malays (although it does not state whether this refers to all Malays in the party, which had a total membership of 588).⁹⁶ The total union membership of 6,035 included 518 Malays and 52 Indians.⁹⁷ Malay membership in the Singapore CYL increased from 3 in 1932 to 20 in 1934 (with 411 Chinese). During 1932, the number of Indians in the Singapore labor union fell from 120 to 20 and the number of Malays from 50 to 20 (total membership of 3,000).⁹⁸ Since 1931, the MCP had printed propaganda material in Malay, and in 1934, Indonesian communists provided language help, although they were concerned with the independence of Indonesia rather than Malaya.⁹⁹ Amir Hamzah Siregar left Singapore for Java in 1934 and was arrested there; an MCP inspector, a Christian Batak named Djoeliman Siregar, was arrested during his tour of Negeri Sembilan and Malacca. A Salim sent a report on Selangor to the CC MCP in 1937.¹⁰⁰ Despite having founded the Malayan Racial Emancipation League in 1936, headed by a committee with two Tamils and two Malays, the MCP remained almost entirely Chinese, also likely because of Malay anti-immigrant stances.¹⁰¹

“The Future of the Nanyang Revolution”

The history of the Chinese words for “assimilation into local society” (tonghua) and “allegiance to China” (guihua) provides insight into the MCP’s understanding of how non-Chinese peoples could be involved in the party. As China expanded territorially before the twentieth century, these terms had come to denote the assimilation of non-Han peoples in the borderlands (tonghua) and foreigners into Chinese culture (guihua); however, there was no word for the reverse process. Although Chinese communities in the Nanyang had been characterized by social adaptation (and a certain loss of their Chineseness), increased migration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had encouraged a process of re-Sinicization by the Chinese state that only encountered barriers when Chinese migration was restricted after 1929.¹⁰² The Nanjing GMD state’s vocabulary of assimilation reflected its acknowledgment of the foreignness of overseas Chinese, who were being re-Sinicized (guihua) to prevent their assimilation into the local culture (tonghua).¹⁰³

Closer links with China, however, also led to tensions between descendants of earlier Chinese migrants who had married local women and had developed more connections with local society. In the face of increased Malay activism, some locally born Chinese leaders, like English-educated Tan Cheng Lock (1883–1960), even began to speak of the “Malayan spirit and consciousness” (emphasis added).¹⁰⁴ Tan was a prominent Malaya-born Chinese businessman and politician, the head of the Straits Chinese British Association in Malacca from 1928 to 1935. There are parallels between his and the MCP’s activity and discourse. He promoted Malaya’s self-government in 1926 as well as Chinese participation in the Legislative Councils of the Federated Malay States and of the Straits Settlements.¹⁰⁵

However, for other Chinese the restrictions on Chinese immigration as a result of the depression and the dramatic increase of Malaya’s locally born Chinese population, from 20.9 percent in 1921 to 29.9 percent in 1931, increased anxiety about the Chineseness of locally born Chinese.¹⁰⁶ Many teachers from Chinese-language schools and writers for Chinese-language newspapers, as well as intellectuals prominent in the MCP, were also GMD members.¹⁰⁷ One example was Xu Jie, the author of the durian story. He was appointed by the CC GMD as an editor of Yiqunbao in Kuala Lumpur in 1928–1929. Xu Jie maintained connections with local communists who shared news with him. In addition to founding New Rise Literature (Xinxing wenyi, 新兴文艺), which was a disguised form of the proletarian revolutionary literature movement, he was involved in local literary movements and with local writers, and he also promoted the concept of “more purely indigenous literature,” Malayan Chinese literature (Ma hua wenxue), and the idea of a Nanyang “local color” (Nanyang secai). This was a response to the condescending attitude toward a local “imitation” of Chinese culture expressed by the first generation of educated migrant Chinese. These local Chinese writers were creating a Nanyang huaqiao culture while also asserting their difference from China. The reorientation toward a Nanyang (local) color was an attempt to redefine the place of Chinese emigrants in Chinese culture, not, as Kenley puts it, “to become indigenous.”¹⁰⁸ Along with the dissatisfaction of the local Chinese with the huaqiao education program that came from the central government in Nanjing and did not take their needs into account, this literary trend can also be viewed as a manifestation of the adaptation efforts by the immigrant Chinese in Malaya. There were complaints that Mandarin teachers who came from China did not want to learn about Malaya. It was hoped that with time locally born teachers would come to teach Mandarin in the schools.¹⁰⁹

According to Kenley, the rise of aspirations for local Chineseness among Chinese intellectuals and their desire to liberate Malaya’s “native” peoples from the British government were the consequences of the increased influence of communist political immigrants from China after 1928.¹¹⁰ Moreover, Chinese intellectuals’ aspirations for a Nanyang huaqiao culture resonated with the CCP’s impulse, expressed in Li Lisan’s letter, to make a Nanyang – not a Chinese – revolution in the Nanyang and with the establishment of a local communist party. This was also encouraged by the Comintern, which ultimately offered an opportunity to put these aspirations into practice. This is illustrated in a story by Xu Jie, a follower of a “nativist” group (xiangtupai), who relied on true stories (which he also mentions in his memoir) as the basis for fiction.¹¹¹

Xu Jie published a story at the same time in January 1929¹¹² when the Chinese communists in Malaya received Li Lisan’s letter. This story contains a discussion of the Nanyang Revolution, echoing Li Lisan’s directive and the reports of the Nanyang communists to the CCP and the Comintern. Xu’s discussion of a Nanyang Revolution likely reflected discussions among Kuala Lumpur communists with whom he was in contact. Xu Jie viewed the revolution in the Nanyang as different from the revolution in China. Whereas in China the revolution was confined to a limited territory because of undeveloped infrastructure, in the Nanyang it would not be easy to stir up a revolution (presumably due to relatively good living conditions), but developed transport and infrastructure would make it easier to coordinate a revolution once it arose. Thus, infrastructure would help not only to crush the revolution but also to conduct it more effectively. Moreover, capitalism in the Nanyang, while fulfilling its own tasks, at the same time contributed to the success of the world revolution. As Xu Jie’s analysis of the Nanyang conditions suggests, the Nanyang’s prosperity struck the Chinese because of its contrast with China.¹¹³ The CC CCP letter written by Li Lisan mentioned the same issues and presented the Nanyang as a place of highly developed industries and hence as the center of the labor movement in the Pacific and the center of communication. The Nanyang CYL also debated with the CCP about the nature of the Nanyang Revolution.¹¹⁴

Xu’s idea that young locally born Chinese would become leaders of the liberation of the oppressed peoples of the Nanyang if they knew the Chinese language was an expression of the GMD’s global vision as well as the goal of cultivating an identification with China among overseas Chinese. In another short story, Xu wrote:

At the bookstore I saw that youngster, Ai Lian … He had a touch of melancholy. I thought, this is that specific expression that the oppressed peoples of the colonies have. In a flash, I also recalled the eyes of that [Indian] man, and the yellow scraggy eyes of that Malay, and also recalled those two flashing bayonets. Ai Lian furtively read Chinese books; he especially liked to read books on social sciences … At that time, our eyes met. Again, like last time on the road, he smiled slightly at me. I also nodded but did not say a word. “You, promising youth, when you train yourself, strengthen yourself, you will become the center of the Nanyang Revolution!”¹¹⁵

Xu’s point – that the hope of the Nanyang Revolution, who would liberate their oppressed fellow countrymen, including Malays and Indians, would be young locally born Chinese who maintained a Chinese identity – provides a rare insight into the intersection of the discourses of the Comintern, Malayan Chinese immigrant intellectuals, the GMD, the CCP, and the English-language public sphere in British Malaya. It also demonstrates the changes in conceptual and social aspects of the discursive community of Chinese revolutionaries.

Xu Jie wanted to include the locally born Chinese in the Nanyang Revolution so that they could fulfill the mission of emancipating “weak nations” through their Chinese identity and Chinese language, which ensured that they were not “slaves” who spoke Malay and English, the language of the colonial regime. The CYL had similar concerns.¹¹⁶ In fact, the two locally born Chinese in Kuala Lumpur, students of a Methodist English school, who figured in Xu’s short story were recruited by the local CYL after they published pieces in Yiqunbao.¹¹⁷ Thus the Nanyang communist organizations started to recruit locally born Chinese who would soon become active in the liberation of Malaya and its oppressed peoples and who would also be in demand by the Comintern, as we see in Chapter 5.

The Chinese identity of the locally born thus translated into their participation in the indigenous revolutionary and nationalist project. The Chinese in another revolutionary project in the Nanyang, the Philippine party, despite its similarities with the Malayan party, did not embrace indigenous nationalism. Here, the Chinese identity of the locally born Chinese also played an important role.

Chineseness: The Philippines

As in Malaya, the first communist organization established in the Philippines was a CCP chapter. There, as among other Chinese overseas communities, the popularity of communist parties grew after the March Eighteenth Massacre (1926), when a demonstration protesting Japanese pressure in the Dagu port was suppressed by the North China (Beiyang) government, and after the May Thirtieth Movement.¹¹⁸ The CCP sent Lin Xingqiu (林星秋) to establish a CCP cell in the Philippines in 1926.¹¹⁹ The Special Philippine Branch (Feilübin tebie zhibu) in Manila (est. 1927) consisted of five communist cells of three people. One student cell was at the University of the Philippines, which intended to recruit Filipinos; one was at the Philippine Chinese middle school (Feiqiao zhongxue); one was at a night school; and two were in the GMD, consisting of workers and shop employees. Shop employees were the majority of party members (twenty-three) as well as primary school students and women outside of Manila.

Altogether, there were thirty “pure” party members (danchun dangyuan). There was also a cell of three people in Suzugun (Japan) and two in Cebu.¹²⁰ In 1927, 300 shop employees established the Association of Chinese Migrant Workers (Fei huaqiao laodong xiehui).¹²¹ In 1928, drawing on the report of Gao Zinong (高子农), alias Meditsinskii (Medical), a Fujianese member of the Chinese CYL sent by the CCP to study in Moscow,¹²² the Comintern planned to establish a communist party in the Philippines.¹²³ Like the Chinese communists in Malaya, Gao promoted political rights for Chinese immigrants in the Philippines and viewed the Nanyang as a location of strategic commercial and military ports, and as a market.¹²⁴

The Philippine party was a chapter of the Chinese transnational communist network. Shared characteristics with the Malaya organization included the popularity of anarchist ideas,¹²⁵ study societies and night schools as hotbeds of Marxist ideas, student and shop employee membership, a connection gap between student leaders and workers, and a workers’ preference for traditional ways of self-organizing (“yellow” unions, as the communists called them) over radical red unions.¹²⁶ As in Malaya, Chinese laborers were reluctant to become involved in local politics or with non-Chinese (yizu), and even with Chinese outside their native place or surname associations (tongxinghui). They were beyond the reach of revolutionary propaganda, as they were illiterate, participated in brotherhoods and friendship associations (xiongdihui and youyishe), and were afraid to protest against their Chinese bosses (see Chapter 4). The GMD had more appeal among “capitalists,” students, and women’s organizations. Chinese communists were also on a mission to liberate the masses of low political and cultural levels (zhengzhi sixiang [wenhua] di), affected by a colonial education, and were happy to report progress among students at Philippine University, formerly “the most backward in the East.”¹²⁷

The Comintern approach to Philippine national emancipation was, similar to its approach in Malaya, by a united front of the Philippine population, under the leadership of the communist party, to bring together “the proletariat, the peasantry, the urban poor, and the revolutionary students – the Moros, mountain tribes, and Chinese toilers, as well as the Christian Filipinos.”¹²⁸ The Comintern also promoted unity between Chinese immigrants and Filipino labor movements and campaigned against the deportation of Chinese workers in the Philippines and internationalist support for the Chinese Rrevolution.¹²⁹ As it had done in Malaya, the Comintern promoted solidarity with the Chinese and Indian Revolutions and contacts with the revolutionary movements in China, Indonesia, Malaya, and the United States.¹³⁰

Why did the Chinese communists in the Philippines not come up with the discourse of a multiethnic Philippine nation despite similarities with the party in Malaya, the long-term presence of a large number of ethnic Chinese, and rule by colonial authorities to overthrow? For one, unlike in Malaya, the Comintern promoted the “equality of all minorities, regardless of race or creed, and their absolute right to self-determination – including complete separation.”¹³¹ Also, the Comintern policy of naming one communist party per host country shaped the organizational forms of Chinese communist organizations in different settings. Where there was already a Comintern-endorsed communist party, Chinese communists joined as a Chinese-language faction, similar to that in Germany and the United States.¹³² In the historical area of Chinese emigration in the Nanyang, where Chinese communists were the earliest communists, and in Malaya and the Philippines, they established national parties. The Philippine party consisting of Chinese migrants had no CCP organizational identity. In contrast to the Nanyang Communist Party, which was responsible for the regional revolution in the Nanyang, the chapter of the Chinese Communist Party in the Philippines was already known as the Philippine Communist Party (Feilübin gongchandang) in 1928 and was organizationally autonomous from the CCP.¹³³ The Comintern established the Communist Party of the Philippine Islands (CPPI) on November 7, 1930, and one year later the Comintern was still pushing the party to connect with the CCP.¹³⁴

In the Philippines, communists were not the only ones promoting independence, unlike in Malaya. Moreover, Chinese mestizos were already considered a part of the Philippine nation and there was an insufficient number of new Chinese immigrants whose rights the party would promote. There was no sense of an intergenerational Chinese identity to bridge the two groups in the late 1920s and early 1930s, despite the continuity of Chinese mestizos’ participation in the Philippine liberation movement, from Jose Rizal to the anti-Japanese resistance during World War II.¹³⁵ As a matter of fact, in 1928 Gao Zinong did not even see Rizal as Chinese. On the contrary, because he was celebrated by the American government as an anti-Spanish Philippine hero, Rizal was considered to be an ally of the “American imperialists.”¹³⁶ There was a lack of shared Chinese identity between Chinese immigrants like Gao and locally born Chinese mestizos, who instead shared a Christian identity with the locals.¹³⁷

As a consequence of Spanish policies regarding the “Filipinization” of Chinese mestizos, by the end of the nineteenth century mestizo culture had become part and parcel of Filipino culture and, after the American takeover, of the discourse of the Philippine “nation” that the American government took up in an effort to coopt nationalist demands. Because of the leadership of Chinese mestizos in the Philippine Revolution, it has been argued that Chinese mestizos laid a foundation for the independent Philippine nation.¹³⁸

American policies also favored Chinese mestizos’ self-identification as Filipino. Not only culturally, Chinese mestizos had already formed a part of the Filipino identity in the late nineteenth century.¹³⁹ Unlike Malaya, the Philippines already existed as a nation-state, albeit not an independent one, and former Chinese mestizos, now called Filipinos, were part of the Philippine people.¹⁴⁰ Gao said the Americans had curtailed the national movement (minzu yundong) through assimilation and manipulation of the nonhomogeneous attitudes of various Philippine nationalities toward independence (Fei ge minzu dui duli yundong de yijian bu yizhi), promoting the idea of the Philippines as part of the confederation of the United States (Meiguo lianbang).¹⁴¹

American exclusion laws had barred the immigration of Chinese laborers to the Philippines, so the communist party lacked the potential constituency of immigrant Chinese who had to become local so as to improve their lot. Unlike their counterparts in British Malaya, by the second half of the nineteenth century Chinese mestizos in the Philippines already owned large landholdings. Moreover, they were able to improve their economic position after the American takeover. In contrast, during the same period in British Malaya, the economic position of locally born Chinese deteriorated.¹⁴² In absolute numbers in 1903–1939, the Chinese population in the Philippines grew from 41,035 to 117,487, which was negligible to the 2 million Chinese immigrants in Malaya. Moreover, unlike in Malaya, beginning in 1935, a Chinese person born in China could – albeit with many conditions that included property ownership – naturalize as Filipino.¹⁴³

Finally, in 1930, there were only twenty-five Chinese Communist Party members and sixty-two Filipinos, including one Chinese member of the Politburo. At the party’s founding conference, there was one Chinese delegate, although Chinese trade unions were the most active in the Philippines.¹⁴⁴

To summarize, by the early 1930s the absence of a discourse of a multiethnic nation among the Chinese communists in the Philippines could be explained by a lack of Chinese members in the communist party, a comparatively low number of Chinese laborers in the Philippines, the relative economic affluence of the local Chinese mestizos, and, possibly, conflicting Comintern ideas about national unity and the self-determination of minorities. In addition, the local Chinese had already became “Filipino” and had become a part of the indigenous nation of the Philippines.

Conclusion

The Comintern exported from Europe not only revolution but also the idea of the nation-state. In British Malaya, this export was facilitated by the Chinese immigrant community that needed to gain political rights that no other existing discourse of national belonging could provide. By 1930, Comintern insistence on the founding of national parties based on separate countries, as well as the British fostering of a Malayan nation, led the MCP to become an early adopter of the multiethnic Malayan state.

The case of minzu is an example of how different understandings of a single word had far-reaching consequences. The term national communicated different meanings to partners in revolution who did not fully understand one another. The shift in the meaning of minzu was produced by the interaction of three realms: the Malayan, the Chinese, and the international, including the Comintern in Moscow and communist organizations in the United States. The crossing of languages, groups, intellectual worlds, and how they perceived and reasoned with shared authoritative texts to address their problems shaped conceptual categories and discourses. The altered meaning of the word minzu reconciled the “Malayan nation” with Chinese nationalism for the members of the MCP.

To involve non-Chinese in a Chinese revolutionary organization, promoted by both the CCP and the GMD, was the MCP’s survival strategy, which we can call indigenization, though the organization was to remain rooted in China by advocating for the rights of the Chinese and by promoting a Chinese identity among locally born Chinese. What Kuhn calls the “embeddedness” of the Chinese community in local society was to be achieved through Chinese leadership in the joint liberation of oppressed local peoples and resident Chinese. The Comintern’s emphasis on the importance of colonial revolutions in the fall of empires in the form of local, that is, Malayan, nationalism offered a perfect solution for the need to be connected to both ends of migration among the Chinese living in colonies overseas. This was through dual nationalism, Chinese and indigenous.¹⁴⁵ As in other transnational identities that provided the basis for the “pan” movements – Slavic, Islamic, and African – that had emerged during the nineteenth century, interwar internationalism also became significant as a vehicle for national identities because it provided an international legitimization for national sovereignty.¹⁴⁶

By encouraging a Malayan Revolution, the Comintern stimulated the nationalization of the revolution in Malaya as opposed to a revolution led by international or expatriate forces. However, though the Chinese communists sought to create a non-Chinese revolution, they continued to perceive the Nanyang in terms of China’s regional imagination, where China was the leader.

In this context, the newly formed MCP understood the Comintern’s communist internationalism and support for the Chinese Revolution as referring to the defense of Chinese interests and the liberation of oppressed nations along the lines of Sun Yatsen’s ideas about China’s political alliance. For Chinese communists located in Singapore and Malaya, the evolving discourse matched the indigenizing need of Chinese organizations, which was also promoted by the Nanjing GMD. Chinese nationalism grafted onto Comintern internationalism became Malayan nation–based nationalism, locally relevant and internationally progressive. This allowed the MCP to secure an unoccupied niche necessary for localization – the niche of the liberators of Malaya.

In another place in Southeast Asia with a long history of Chinese patronage, settlement, and localization, the Philippines, the spread of the Western idea of the nation-state and the patterns of Chinese migration and localization also shaped the formation of an indigenous nation by the end of the nineteenth century with a strong role of the local Chinese.¹⁴⁷ Yet, as the discourse of a soon-to-be-independent Philippine nation had been embraced by the American government, Chinese communists could not claim a niche as liberators of the Philippines from colonialism, for that niche was already occupied.¹⁴⁸ As such, the Comintern’s brand of internationalism was redundant for Chinese localization in the Philippines. In this story of international forces and regional imaginations, the Chinese identity of migrant Chinese was an important factor determining whether they would engage in indigenous nationalism.

Comparable concerns about political rights in Western colonies in Southeast Asia shaped Chinese political participation in indigenous nationalist projects and their identities vis-à-vis the local population. Different colonial policies shaped the configuration of ideas of ethnic, civic, and national belonging in the Malay realm. Writing in the late 1940s, Tan Malaka, who, together with Alimin,¹⁴⁹ in 1925 prepared the first manifesto of a communist party in the Philippines, attributed the participation of mestizos in the Philippine Revolution to the common religion, Christianity, but called them “indigenous Indonesians” and stressed the continuity between the Philippine Revolution and the Indonesian communist movement.¹⁵⁰ Tan Malaka embraced the idea of Indonesia Raya, Greater Indonesia, which in precolonial times included the Philippines, Malaya, and Indonesia;¹⁵¹ Ibrahim Yaacob was also a proponent of Greater Malay Unity (Melayu Raya), which he based on bangsa (common descent), thus excluding non-Malays.¹⁵²

Despite differences resulting from the position of Malays as the dominant group in Malaya and Malay concepts of national belonging in East Sumatra and Malaya, Malaya and the Dutch East Indies saw parallels in the development of the concepts of national belonging, the place of communists in that development, and Chinese participation in its gestation during the same time period. In Malaya and East Sumatra, with similar political cultures centered on the institution of a sultanate (kerajaan) and analogous colonial policies undermining the authority of sultans, and a high proportion (more than 50 percent) of immigrant Chinese, which spurred similar resentment among the Malays, Malays saw the idea of Indonesia as undermining their rights to land. In Malaya in the 1920s, sultans called for restoration of their power and even in 1940, at the Malay congress, participants were unwilling to link the descent-based bangsa to kebangsaan (nationalist and independence) goals in defining the Malay identity.¹⁵³

In the Dutch East Indies, where by the early 1920s the term Indonesia was accepted and used among nationalist organizations,¹⁵⁴ the communist PKI was the first to adopt “Indonesia” in its name, as the Comintern promoted the concept of “one party, one country.” In 1927, the Perserikatan Tionghwa Indonesia (Union of Chinese of Indonesia) was founded by the Peranakan Chinese, and in 1928, a conference of social groups in Batavia adopted the goal of one nation, one homeland, one language. The Dutch also promoted Malay, or Bahasa Indonesia, as a unifying language, and in the following year, Sukarno organized the Partai Nasional Indonesia, the Nationalist Party of Indonesia.¹⁵⁵

Comparable discussions of concepts of national belonging among the MCP and among the Chinese in Indonesia stemmed from the Chinese community movement for political and landownership rights. The relationship with local nationalism among Chinese communities in the Malay realm was shaped by a reaction to colonial policies in Southeast Asia and the Comintern’s promotion of national parties and Chinese participation in those parties. All these also shaped the parties’ organizational hybridity.