‘I am safer in Hong Kong’: Transimperial entanglements in Filipino nationalist explorations

Abstract

Between 1907 and 1914, Filipino lawyer, journalist, and nationalist Vicente Sotto found in Hong Kong a sanctuary from the clutches of the Americans. The city also provided him with a space in which to explore alternative ideas for both his own development and the future of the Philippine Islands beyond the confines of pan-Asianism and anti-imperialism. Using Sotto’s experience in Hong Kong as a point of access, this article demonstrates modern Asia’s anti-imperial era as a product of transimperial ‘connectivities’ and ‘ruptures’ wherein new political affinities were forged between like-minded Asians, while interstitial imperial spaces between colony and metropole carved space for radical, yet nuanced and inconsistent, visions of national independence to materialize—at the expense of abutting empires. It serves to decentralize the role of empire, conflating instead the activities of local, colonial, and imperial actors as a singular experience that shaped modern Asia’s revolutionary decades.

Introduction

In May 1912, self-exiled Filipino nationalist Vicente Sotto penned in his Hong Kong-based newspaper the following: ‘There is still Justice in the world. At least in this British colony’.¹ Printed alongside was a portrait of Hong Kong chief justice, Sir Francis Piggot, a ‘hero’ who had quashed, against advice from Whitehall, the first of three American demands for Sotto to be surrendered as a fugitive of the Philippine Islands. The imprints of British Hong Kong on Sotto transcended his protection under extraterritoriality. During his time in the city, from 1907 to 1914, he shuffled between the roles of stark anti-American nationalist, pan-Asianist, and Democrat supporter, in the process radicalizing as an advocate of Filipino independence.² Delving into a narrative that unfolded on the peripheries of the American and British empires, this article is an invitation to rethink revolution in modern Asia as a pragmatic exploration shaped by multi-layered transimperial intricacies and autonomies.³ Under the auspices of the British empire, Vicente Sotto was not only safe from the clutches of the Americans, but he also found in Hong Kong a bracing space in which to explore alternative ideas for his own development and the futureof the Philippine Islands.

Enabled by scattered collaborative efforts between revolutionaries situated in different parts of the world, modern Asia’s anti-imperial movements were built on global networks that facilitated political affiliations and intellectual exchanges between radicals, exiles, and/or diasporic communities.⁴ The growth of imperial efforts to police revolutionary activities in the early twentieth century prompted radicals to cross into foreign spaces, forming, in Tim Harper’s description, an ‘underground Asia’ that nested anti-imperial solidarities across South, Southeast Asia, and East Asia.⁵ A strand of literature has shown the importance of such cross-border activities in enabling modern Asia’s anti-imperial era, particularly how radicals used port-city environments to expand and disseminate anti-colonialism and/or new nationalisms.⁶ From Indian revolutionaries in French Chandernagore to the anti-French Vietnamese in Siam and Macau, it was in cities under foreign governance that countless Asian revolutionaries replanted and grew their anti-colonial activities.⁷ Vicente Sotto’s political pursuits and pan-Asian affiliations, encompassing two empires spanning East and Southeast Asia, echo the idea that modern Asian nationalist movements were closely tied to personal experiences of transimperial dynamics. This will be discussed in the first section where I trace the various shifts in Sotto’s political ideas and affinities in relation to his self-exile to Hong Kong. Notably, his eagerness to search for a viable path to Filipino independence entailed inconsistent views towards American rule that swayed between hostility and accord.

A cosmopolitan port-city by the 1900s, British Hong Kong drew aspiring urbanites from different backgrounds to work together for a more ‘ideal’ world.⁸ It was also an important refuge for many Asian radicals struggling for different causes, ranging from anti-Manchu advocates to Luso-Asian progressives lambasting the Macau government over Portugal’s strict press censorship.⁹ Owing to the colonial administration’s repeated attempts to protect anti-imperial nationalists, often at the expense of conflicting with the metropole and foreign imperial governments, Hong Kong proved to be a safe and liberal hothouse for thinkers and radicals. During the well-publicized deportation case of Ho Chi Minh, the Hong Kong authorities refused to accede to French demands to deport Ho, sparing him from the death sentence that awaited in Saigon. Despite the Foreign Office’s advice to deport Ho, the Hong Kong governor fought for his release, causing a conflict between the colonial authorities and the Foreign Office. The Privy Council ultimately concurred to help the governor save face.¹⁰ Echoing Ho’s experience, Indonesian radical Tan Malaka was arrested in Hong Kong in 1932. Instead of turning him in as requested by the Dutch, he was deported to Amoy where he continued to hide from the colonial authorities of the East Indies.¹¹ With a conviction for the abduction of a minor hanging over him, Vicente Sotto’s case was a slippery one, even for the British. As I will show in the second section, the Hong Kong government went to great lengths to secure his freedom, causing bitter dissension within the British empire and friction between London and Washington. This illustrates, first, the importance of the autonomy of colonial governments in regard to radical activities, and second, the interstitial spaces between the British and American empires which allowed for the refuge of Asian nationalists and their activities.

As Harper’s ‘underground Asia’ suggests, anti-imperial networks among Asians—physical or otherwise—were extensive and robust. The Filipino independence movement, struggling first against the Spaniards and then the Americans, was a transnational affair that connected the history of the Philippines to wider political, cultural, and intellectual events in East and Southeast Asia, as well as across the Pacific. A strand of scholarly literature has focused attention on the transnational and inter-spatial characteristics of the Filipino revolution: Matthiessen highlighted the impacts of Japanese pan-Asianism on Filipino thinkers, whereas Aboitiz revealed how Filipinos connected with other colonized peoples in the region through the construction of ‘Asia’ as a shared space.¹² It has to be noted, however, that nuances existed in how radicals experienced the American empire and absorbed what it had to offer, as seen in Suh’s analysis of transpacific collaborations and exclusions.¹³ Following this vein of thinking, my article reconsiders what Vicente Sotto’s shifting political affinities to the American and British empires, and his precarious relationship with other anti-imperial Filipino radicals, can reveal about the subtle fissures buried within the broader East-Southeast Asia ‘underground’ of modern Asia’s anti-imperial era.

A pragmatic anti-American in British space

Vicente Yap Sotto was born in the Central Visayas city of Cebu in 1877 to Marcelino Sotto, a labour supervisor in Tondo, Manila, and Pascuala Yap, a Chinese mestiza vendor who sold puso (cooked rice wrapped in coconut leaves) in Binondo. Sotto grew up in comfortable circumstances; he and his brother went to the best school for Cebuanosand Vicente later attended law school in Manila. While coming of age, Sotto witnessed the unfolding of the Philippine revolution: after the failure of La Liga Filipina to start institutional reforms and the death of revolutionary leader José Rizal in 1896, the underground Katipunan surfaced as a revolutionary government and started their armed revolt against the Spanish colonial authorities.¹⁴ The anti-colonial struggle, however, was plagued by internal divisions and afflicted by the intense rivalry between its two leading figures, Andrés Bonifacio and Emilio Aguinaldo; the latter signed a truce with the Spaniards and later began working with the Americans while exiled in Hong Kong.¹⁵ Within this broader picture, Cebu was one of many battlegrounds between the Spaniards and the Filipino insurgents. For a brief period, the Filipino insurgents had control of the town but were defeated by the Spanish. In 1898, Sotto’s hometown was left in a state of devastation, as documented by a British official: ‘Many of the houses were set on fire and destroyed, and a great number of rebels and Chinese were killed. The Spanish troops had orders to kill everything that moved and women and children also suffered the penalty.’¹⁶ An ephemeral progress emerged after an agreement of collaboration was reached with the United States.

Sotto was in his early twenties when the First Philippine Republic briefly materialized, only to be shattered by American imperial ambitions. This momentary glimpse of a burgeoning Filipino nation would ground Sotto’s future pursuits as he became set on reviving the Philippine Republic by any means. To disseminate his vision of re-establishing the Republic, Sotto resorted to the pen. Not long after the Americans occupied Cebu in 1899, he launched La Justícia, the first Filipino-run Spanish-language weekly in Cebu, commencing what would be a long and controversial career in journalism. Sotto would be behind a number of other newspapers, including El Nacional (1899), El Pueblo (1900), and Ang Suga (1901–1912), the first Cebuano newspaper meant to open the eyes of those asleep to the truth of the ‘enslaved, oppressed, derided, and abused’ nation.¹⁷ Although well-read and widely circulated, the newspapers, aside from Ang Suga, were curtailed for exposing the American government’s wrongdoings. Apart from his newspaper articles, Sotto authored a number of short stories in Spanish and Cebuano, many of which circled around themes of social tension rooted in political differences and self-sacrifice for the sake of the country.¹⁸ Owing to his outspoken ways, Sotto became an target for the Americans: he was jailed once for being an ‘agent’ of the Philippine Republic and repeatedly charged with libel and sedition.

One of the developments that distinguishes Vicente Sotto from other Filipino revolutionaries is how his self-exile to Hong Kong initially served a personal purpose. In 1906, he faced charges for the abduction (rapto) of a minor, Aquilina Vasquez, a girl he had been pursuing who was a few months shy of turning 18. Sotto was convicted to serve four years and two months and fined a dowry of 500 pesos to be paid to Vasquez, against which he made an appeal.¹⁹ In 1907, a watershed year for Vicente Sotto, he passed his bar examinations, won the Cebu mayoral election by a landslide, and left the Philippine Islands on bail with his appeal pending. Like many Filipinos fleeing the colonial authorities, Sotto left for neighbouring southern China. He took with him his aspirations for his homeland and during his exile, sought ways to continue his struggle. A 1908 news report revealed that Sotto was briefly in Portuguese Macau where he attempted to start an English-Spanish weekly newspaper titled The Philippine Republic. The paper was banned from being mailed to the Philippine Islands and the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post (SCMP) predicted it would have a short existence and could possibly be ‘proscribed by the authorities in Macao’.²⁰

In his first few months in Hong Kong, Sotto worked playing the piano at the Stag hotel and in cinema houses while giving private Spanish lessons.²¹ Although he struggled to make ends meet, he found the British city a more liberal space in which to express his thoughts and vocalize his aspirations. Between 1908 and 1910, he wrote three stories in Cebuano, self-reflections on the misdeeds of the American colonial authorities through the lens of his own experiences. Buang kun manggugubut? (Madman or rebel?), for instance, featured a young man arrested for publicly encouraging resistance to the Americans.²² In October 1911, he re-established The Philippine Republic at 47 Haiphong Road, Kowloon, pledging to defend ‘the sacred and legitimate rights of the Filipino people’.²³ Vicente Sotto stated the newspaper’s aim in the first issue: ‘As convinced Radicals, we support the idea of the capacity of our country of her immediate Independence, and we advocate it, by whatever means or form that circumstances may demand.’²⁴ He believed that the establishment of the First Philippine Republic in 1898 had proven the Filipinos’ capacity to self-govern and thus called for the restoration of the regime.

Although consistent, Vicente Sotto’s determination to resuscitate the Philippine Republic was not grounded in anti-American notions. It was in Hong Kong, which had long been a sanctuary for Filipino exiles and home to an unofficial Filipino-Japanese rapport, that Sotto turned to explore new possibilities for the future of self-government in his homeland. Decades before his arrival, Hong Kong was already an established interim refuge for Filipinos seeking foreign aid: exiles who fled the Philippines after the 1872 Cavite mutiny used Hong Kong either as a passage to other cities or as a place to print anti-Spanish propaganda for circulation in the Philippines.²⁵ In 1896, anti-Spanish revolutionary Mariano Ponce fled to Hong Kong where he formed the Comité Central Filipino to forge international partnerships to aid the Philippine revolution. In 1898, Emilio Aguinaldo, representing the revolutionary government in exile (Hong Kong Junta), reached Singapore via Hong Kong where he entered into negotiations with the American consul to permit military cooperation between Filipino insurgents and the Americans against the Spaniards.²⁶ With the support of the Junta, Ponce travelled from Hong Kong to Japan to explore the possibilities of Japanese aid.²⁷ This Filipino-Japanese connection survived via Hong Kong even after the Junta disbanded in 1903, in the person of Artemio Ricarte y Vibora, a former Katipunan general who had been deported to Guam in 1901 and to Hong Kong twice in 1903 for refusing to take an oath of allegiance to the United States.²⁸ After secretly returning to the Philippines, Ricarte was sentenced to six years in solitary confinement in a Manila prison for sedition; upon his release, he was banished once more to Hong Kong for plotting anti-American activities.²⁹ The availability of existing networks in Japan and the crossing of Sotto’s and Ricarte’s paths in Hong Kong would steer Vicente Sotto towards the idea of Filipino-Japanese collaboration under Pan-Asianism.

In 1909, Sotto was roped into a trip to Tokyo by a secret delegation of Filipino revolutionaries stationed in Hong Kong where they discussed, with an unofficial Japanese representative, the possibilities of Filipino military support in the event of a US-Japanese war.³⁰ Another account documented Sotto’s visit to Japan with Bonifacio Arevalo, previously a member of La Liga Filipina, to purchase arms.³¹ His involvement with pro-Japanese Filipino radicals brought him into contact with Mariano Ponce, who by then had married a Japanese woman, ran a ‘violently nationalistic’ newspaper in Japan, and was an avid supporter of Teaist pan-Asianism, which idealized the idea of Asian solidarity against Western colonialism.³² Little is known of what came out of this meeting. Sotto soon returned to Hong Kong where he met Artemio Ricarte.³³ A staunch anti-imperialist and pan-Asianist, Ricarte would influence Sotto’s radicalization in Hong Kong. Sharing the same vision for their country, a partnership transpired: in 1911, they co-founded, with other Filipino revolutionaries, the Consejo Revolucionario de Filipinas (Revolutionary Council of the Philippines (Figure 1) to achieve the ‘immediate and complete independence’ of the Philippine islands and ‘the equalization of wealth’.³⁴ Ricarte was president and Sotto served as secretary of state.

Figure 1. Members of the Consejo Revolucionario de Filipinas, circa 1911. Vicente Sotto (seated on the right) and fellow radicals Artemio Ricarte (seated on the left) and Onkihiko Usa (middle), photographed with Filipino revolutionaries Juan Leandro Villarino and Ignacio Velasco with a copy of The Philippine Republic. Source: Photograph reproduced from the Henry Hill Bandholtz Papers, Michigan Historical Collections, and provided by Southeast Asia Digital Library, http://sea.lib.niu.edu.

With an office at 7 Arbuthnot Road, Central, the council received funds from supporters in Hong Kong and the Philippines and networked with a Japanese ultranationalist. Its revolutionary attempts, however, only went as far as printing anti-American propaganda and encouraging the boycott of American goods in the Philippine Islands.³⁵ The council formally dissolved in 1913 due to an ongoing dispute between Ricarte and Sotto, which revealed the nuances in the vision of Filipino radicals regarding the fate of their country. Sotto refused to embrace Ricarte’s firm belief in overthrowing Western imperialism through allying with other Asians, an idea that was shared by other Filipino nationalists like Mariano Ponce. Sotto believed that Filipinos were able to lead their own revolution and that aid from Japan, as well as other Asian allies, were but a means to restore the Philippine Republic.³⁶ This was rooted in Sotto’s unparalleled confidence in Philippine civilization: he saw Filipinos as more progressive than many other Asian communities and believed the Japanese could serve as a natural ally to aid the Philippines towards achieving independence on equal footing.³⁷

Hong Kong’s spirited public sphere helped bolster such a perception, particularly as Sotto engaged in verbal sparring with the colony’s residents in the pages of a local newspaper. In 1913, he wrote to the editor of the SCMP stating that Filipinos were superior to and far more civilized than the Chinese. The letter stirred a week-long debate that saw other residents rushing to offer their thoughts on Sotto’s demeaning statement. Sotto repudiated a comment that Filipinos had Chinese blood, stating: ‘all Chinese [were] thieves and pirates’. He argued that Filipinos, having had three centuries of contact with Europeans, were more civilized for being Christians and ‘the only Oriental people’ to dream of forming a modern republic.³⁸ In the same year, Sotto criticized Messrs Thos. Cook and Son for printing a travel guide to the Philippines that featured, he observed, ‘non-Christian savages inhabiting the mountains’ and ‘dressed in Nature’s garb’. Sotto argued that this misleadingly presented Filipinos as ‘savages still in the clutches of ignorance’ and was a ‘gross injustice’. He clarified, in italicized text for emphasis, that there were ‘eight million Christian Filipinos with European civilization and with a higher culture and capacity than several free and independent nations of to-day’, which were, he stated, Cuba, Brazil, and Portugal, where there were more illiterate people than in the Philippines.³⁹

While his counterparts traversed the world of pan-Asianism, Vicente Sotto stood strong in his faith that Filipino self-government was achievable and had to be attained by any means. By late 1912, this meant mellowing his views on the Americans, particularly in the wake of the US presidential elections and emerging Democratic noises in Washington concerning Republican abuse of Filipinos. Through the Hong Kong media, Sotto expressed his support for the Democrats, commending the party’s criticism of American ‘imperialism and colonial exploitation in the Philippines’ and applauded Woodrow Wilson’s promise to ‘set up the rule of justice and of right’ by granting the Filipino nation freedom and development.⁴⁰ In a big turnaround from his attack on the Americans at the beginning of his political career, he proposed Filipino-American collaboration as another path towards the recovery of the Philippine Republic. In an article, Sotto pleaded with the Americans to sympathize with Filipino desires and ambitions, while asking Filipinos to sympathize with American difficulties and the complexities of dealing with domestic and overseas affairs.⁴¹ He subsequently sent a telegram of congratulations to Washington after the election, in which he reminded President Woodrow Wilson: ‘[the Philippines] now turns to you for her redemption and for the fulfillment of those reiterated promises embodied in the last four platforms of the Democratic Party’. Sotto was delighted to receive a brief thank-you note from Wilson.⁴² Although Wilson made no further mention of his campaign promise, Sotto was hopeful for the future. He announced that he would leave Hong Kong for Manila as soon as the new governor-general arrived because he had confidence that the Democratic administration would fulfil their promises.

If viewed from a transimperial lens, nationalistic explorations connected Asia as much as it divided and diversified the political affinity of its thinkers, driving the possibilities of self-government beyond the confines of anti-imperialism. Sotto’s inconsistent views of the American government, which oscillated between hostility and amity, exemplified the eagerness to explore different paths to achieve Philippine independence. British Hong Kong provided Filipino radicals with the liberal space, no longer conceivable on American soil, to dream, to think, and to explore: José Rizal saw Hong Kong as a bastion of development, and Ponce proclaimed ‘The city of Victoria, which is what the city of Hong Kong is called, impressed me greatly.’⁴³ In what is so far the most extensive biography of Vicente Sotto, author Resil Mojares noted that the Hong Kong experience radicalized the revolutionary and deepened his nationalistic desires, stating, ‘It may be argued that the militance of Sotto was a product of bittersweetness over his exile and the fact that, in Hongkong, he was outside the surveillance and punitive reach of American authorities.’⁴⁴ Sotto acknowledged this freedom in a political caricature printed in Ang Suga in 1911, which showed a cartoon of him sitting on top of a pile of sedition and libel cases. He was depicted holding his earlier publications and a spear-like quill on which his banned newspapers were impaled and his enemies shown hanging from the bloody tip.⁴⁵

Although a collective aspiration to free their homeland from the grasp of foreigners intersected in the paths of Filipino revolutionaries, their differing responses to encounters in foreign spaces is telling of nuanced visions that dynamized the Filipino nationalist movement. Unlike Ponce and Ricarte, both of whom had been involved in the long anti-colonial struggle and believed in uprooting imperialism, Vicente Sotto was captivated by the thought of re-establishing the Philippine Republic, even when this entailed working with the Americans. Interwoven with their time in and admiration for British Hong Kong, the collaboration between and eventual uncoupling of the Filipino radicals demonstrates not only the presence of scattered personal narratives that accounted for modern Asia’s manifold anti-colonial era, but also the Filipino twentieth-century nationalist experience as a transimperial project wherein exiled radicals acted according to their own circumstances and interests at the expense of solidarity. As I will show in the next section, the circumstances of colonial Hong Kong nurtured the growth of Filipino radicals at the expense of creating tension between the colony and the metropole, and eventually between the British and American empires.

Hong Kong, the land of the free

Of the linkages between the Philippine revolution and Asia, the connection to Japan has overshadowed other entanglements, including that with Hong Kong.⁴⁶ At less than 900 nautical miles, the proximity of the Philippines to Hong Kong made the British colony a convenient destination for exiles and a strategic place for the purchase and/or transit of arms used during the struggle against the Spanish regime.⁴⁷ The Hong Kong press further emerged as an outlet where the Philippine revolution was discussed, though usually to secure British interests.⁴⁸ The frequency of activities linked to the Filipino anti-imperial movement in Hong Kong prompted the Americans to keep a close eye on the British colony. Letters were sent between Washington and London, instructing the Foreign Office to pay attention to the Hong Kong Junta.⁴⁹ Of the Junta’s final days in action in 1903, the New York Times expressed the suspicion that the Filipinos were conspiring to stir anti-American sentiment in Hong Kong. In a fascinating theory, the article suggested members of the Junta were trying to recruit Chinese radicals by dressing up in the Manchu fashion.⁵⁰

On the British colonial front, the attitude towards Filipino exiles was capricious, usually depending on the preferences of the governors in office. Hong Kong was, after all, an unpredictable imperial formation comprising ‘free’ non-interference in the movement of bodies and things, and various ‘security apparatuses’ that helped safeguard control.⁵¹ In dealing with political exiles, the colonial government lurched between assistance and eradication. In 1904, for instance, the colonial authorities hardened their stance on the remaining members of the Junta, which had been reconstituted under the leadership of Ricarte. Governor Francis Henry May sought approval to banish these Filipinosfrom the Foreign Office but received a negative response.⁵² Cautious about creating unnecessary noise, London advised the Hong Kong government to hold back from further action unless the Philippine government applied for extradition. A British official recorded: the Junta ‘[did] not appear to affect the preservation of order & tranquility in the colony’, and thus ought not be expelled from Hong Kong.⁵³ By the time this dialogue was under way, Ricarte had already been captured by the Americans in Bataan and was soon convicted for sedition.⁵⁴

In the case of Vicente Sotto, the Hong Kong authorities actively sought ways to secure his release, even when advised otherwise by the Foreign Office. The caveat was that the Hong Kong court and government had to hand proof supporting his conviction for abduction, but never found solid evidence to prove his requisition was for a political offence. Nevertheless, the circumstances surrounding the sudden demand won Sotto the sympathy of the Britons, who became more concerned about wrongfully extraditing a man than preventing a diplomatic blunder between Washington and London.⁵⁵ From 1907 to 1911, Vicente Sotto lived in relative peace in Hong Kong with the permission of the Philippine colonial government. This changed shortly after the (re)establishment of The Philippine Republic in Hong Kong in October 1911 and the publicity it received from political campaigners in the 1912 presidential election. In particular, democratic newspapers in the United States used Sotto’s criticism of the Philippine government to demonstrate the maladministration of the Republican party across its overseas territories.⁵⁶

On 12 March 1912, at the request of the governor general of the Philippines, Sotto was charged with and remanded for the crime of abduction within the jurisdiction of the Philippine Islands. In court, Sotto showed a strong determination to prove his requisition was for political reasons. Using his record of two prosecutions for sedition and 24 counts of libel, he claimed before the court that the demand was mala fides (in bad faith), with the intention of exacting political revenge.⁵⁷Sotto admitted to being a political offender and to having abducted a girl in the Philippines, but he asserted that his requisition was meant to punish him for his political activities in Hong Kong.⁵⁸ He was denied bail and spent 29 days in the Victoria gaol. The subsequent court hearings drew considerable attention, much of which surrounded the question of the relationship between the United States and the Philippines Islands. According to section 17 of the Extradition Act of 1870, the requisition of fugitives from a foreign state found in British possessions had to be made by a consul general, consul, or vice-consul; if they were from a foreign colony or dependency, the governor of that colony or dependency would have to be the responsible figure applying for their surrender. In line with the United States’ decision to refrain from defining their overseas territories as ‘colonies’, the American consul general told the Hong Kong court: ‘The Philippine Islands are a constituent part of the U.S.A. We have no colonies, dependencies nor protectorates.’⁵⁹

This statement eventually secured Sotto’s first release. As per Sotto’s request, the acting Hong Kong governor, Claud Severn, ordered for a writ of habeas corpus to be taken out. Sotto was discharged on the grounds that if the Philippines were an integral part of US territory, the consul-general should have made the requisition. The magistrate also pointed out the documents provided by the Philippine court, which included uncertified sheets, made it impossible for the Philippine court’s judgment of conviction to be authenticated according to English law. Since extradition could be granted for serious criminal cases but was not allowed for offences of a political nature, the case was closed, with a few loose ends. Chief Justice Francis Piggott noted that ‘the Court was [still] left in the dark as to the true relations between the Philippines and the United States’ and that it remained a matter of contention whether Sotto’s abduction conviction was being used to punish him for his revolutionary activities.⁶⁰ An official report of the case outlined the dilemma of having an accused person placed on the same footing as a convicted person, which pushed the court to ‘one of the […] blank spaces of the law’. The dilemma lay in the fact that there was evidence proving his political offences and abduction crime in the Philippines, but there was no proof that the Americans were demanding his requisition for political reasons. Although not given as actual evidence, the Hong Kong government stressed that Sotto had remained unmolested in Hong Kong until the Democrats and anti-colonial campaigners in the Philippines began using The Philippine Republic for their own purposes.⁶¹ The Hong Kong authorities expressed strong doubts that the American government and Philippine authorities would be able to give assurance that the requisition had been made ‘in all good faith’.⁶²

While the Sotto case amused the Hong Kong and Filipino public, the Foreign Office became apprehensive. A dispatch from the foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, conveyed Whitehall’s refusal to accept Piggott’s view. The government in London maintained that the Treaty of Peace signed at Paris between the United States and Spain in 1898 clearly defined the cession of the Philippine Islands to the United States, which the American consul general of Hong Kong confirmed by stating the Philippines was a ‘constituent part’ of the United States. The Foreign Office explained further that the cession was ratified in Washington in 1899, and a 1905 Act of Congress extended the Extradition Act to the Philippine Islands. Sir Edward Grey expressed his difficulty in endorsing the opinion of the Hong Kong authorities but assented to the argument that, ‘in strictness’, the application for extradition should have been made by the US consul general of Hong Kong rather than by the governor of the Philippines.⁶³

A few months later, in November 1912, Vicente Sotto was arrested again on a new extradition warrant obtained by the American authorities.⁶⁴ The move came 11 days after he had endorsed Woodrow Wilson for proposing an immediate declaration of American purpose to recognize the independence of the Philippine Islands.⁶⁵ Sotto was released on a bail of US$ 5,000, which was put up by his Filipino associates. The Hong Kong government, backed by the advice of the colony’s attorney general, firmly refused to reopen the proceedings.⁶⁶ In early December, Governor May, who had returned for another term in office, took the matter into his own hands. Perhaps with his failed deportation of the Junta in mind, he ordered the arrest warrant to be cancelled and Sotto to be set free.⁶⁷ The SCMP reported that after his release, Portuguese, Peruvians, Chileans, and Filipinos gathered to celebrate at a banquet that started with toasts and songs and ended with the Filipino national hymn.⁶⁸

The decision to protect Sotto and refrain from collaborating with the Americans placed the Hong Kong colonial government, and subsequently Whitehall, in a difficult position. Knowing they had evaded the Foreign Office’s previous instructions, the governor had the colonial attorney general John A. Bucknill write a strong justification. In it, Bucknill laid out eight points to support Sotto’s release. He described the circumstances of the case as ‘peculiar’ and thus that they had to be handled ‘with a great deal of anxiety and care’. Bucknill specifically highlighted three points: first, that the girl Sotto abducted had voluntarily gone to live with him, and the abduction crime was, thus, questionable; second, the US administration only filed for extradition after the establishment of The Philippine Republic, despite knowing for four years that Sotto had been residing in the British colony; and third, it was questionable under the English Habeas Corpus Act whether a person who had been discharged from custody on a habeas corpus could be lawfully vexed with further proceedings for the same matter (res judicata). Accentuating the Hong Kong government’s stance, the attorney general stated he had an ‘uncomfortable feeling’ about the government surrendering a man who could be punished indirectly for his political views and he expressed grave doubt over whether the Hong Kong authorities should assist the Americans in their repeated application for Sotto’s extradition.⁶⁹

Faced with the colonial authorities’ non-cooperation, the American consul general of Hong Kong telegraphed the White House in the hope that they would pressure the Foreign Office to intervene. Seeing the possibility of upsetting the United States, the Foreign Office advised the Hong Kong governor to allow the requisition proceedings to take place and to inform the United States chargé d’affaires of any further developments concerning the case.⁷⁰ Grey made it clear to the Hong Kong authorities that he was unable to act on the governor’s decision. Using another court case as an example, he argued that according to English law, an accused person committed for extradition but released on habeas corpus on account of a technical defect in the procedure could be brought up again on the same charge. Res judicata, thus, did not apply to Sotto’s circumstances. Grey also refused to endorse the Hong Kong authorities’ view that Sotto was being tried for political offences due to the lack of solid evidence.⁷¹

Two months later on 5 June 1913, Sotto was arrested for the third time. He was let out on a US$ 5,000 bail after spending an hour in jail.⁷² As in 1912, issues raised during the court sessions intrigued the local and Filipino press, with lengthy discussions ensuing regarding the status of the Philippine Islands under the United States and the citizenship of Filipino people.⁷³ Sotto’s lawyer, G. K. Hall Brutton, questioned how far the Philippines was integrated into American territory. He pointed out that if Chinese people born in Hong Kong were considered ‘British’ subjects but Filipinos born in the Philippines were ‘Filipinos’, then the Philippine Islands was not granted the rights to citizenship, naturalization, equal tariffs, and trial by jury as outlined in the US constitution. With this in mind, Brutton maintained that the Philippine Islands could not be considered an integral part of the United States in ‘ordinary’ terms.⁷⁴ Pushing forth the argument of res judicata, Brutton deployed a recent case where a German in India, released by the Supreme Court on a writ of habeas corpus due to an error in procedure, was later discharged by the Privy Council following a repeated arrest for the same crime in London.⁷⁵ After 22 hearings, the magistrate declared that Sotto had been convicted of an extradition crime but was to be discharged on the ground of res judicata.⁷⁶ The press quoted Brutton closing the case: ‘there [could] be no appeal [in the future]’, but unbeknown to them, the magistrate, having disregarded Sir Edward Grey’s advice on the technicalities of res judicata, had made a legal mistake in his judgment.

While on the surface the case was resolved in favour of Vicente Sotto, the struggle to justify the Hong Kong government’s decision had only just begun. Ten days after Sotto’s release, US Consul General Anderson lambasted the Hong Kong government in a letter of complaint. He proposed a proceeding by mandamus, which would require the Supreme Court to overrule the magistrate under the instructions of the Crown.⁷⁷ Subsequently, the Hong Kong government wrote to the Foreign Office for advice: Attorney General Bucknill admitted that there was ‘very little doubt’ that the magistrate had given a wrong decision in law because res judicata could only be effective if the grounds that led to Sotto’s initial discharge were non-technical. Three possibilities—appeal, mandamus, and restarting proceedings under another magistrate—were considered, but Bucknill highlighted the difficult circumstances the Hong Kong court would face in each scenario. He informed the secretary of state of the peculiarities of the situation and advised rethinking whether it was desirable at all for Hong Kong to take further steps in the matter.⁷⁸

Unable to pressure the Hong Kong authorities to reopen the case, Anderson asked Walter Hines Page, the United States ambassador in London, to press the Foreign Office for a response. In a letter to Sir Edward Grey, Page revealed the US State Department was showing great interest in the extradition of Sotto and, thus, he ‘hope[d] the Hongkong authorities may be brought to see the situation in accordance with the views expressed by the Foreign Office’ that res judicata was incompatible with the case.⁷⁹ In a memo, a member of staff of the Home Office expressed sympathy towards Sotto; he declared that he was inclined to ‘believe his theory that the whole business was political’ and that it was clear to the authorities in London that the magistrate had made an error. In order not to inflict further damage, they suggested the Hong Kong authorities made no move unless the American consul general filed for a mandamus.⁸⁰ The Hong Kong government took this advice, which greatly annoyed the Americans. In November 1912, the American embassy at London sent another dispatch to Sir Edward Grey. Walter Page, instructed again by Anderson from Hong Kong, passed on a complaint regarding the ‘annoyance and loss of time and effort involved in such suits’ for American consular officials.⁸¹ The Foreign Office responded that although the Hong Kong court’s decision did not correspond with the advice from London, they had no interest in interfering in the matter. It was, however, open to seeing the US consul general of Hong Kong initiate proceedings to test the validity of the magistrate’s decision.⁸²

This is the last piece of correspondence in the British archival records concerning the extradition case of Vicente Sotto. Luckily for him, Woodrow Wilson was elected president of the United States and the political atmosphere began to change in the Philippines. After his final release in August 1913, Vicente Sotto began to alter his political views in order to better negotiate a safe return home. In October, he transmitted, on behalf of Hong Kong’s Filipino community, a telegram of congratulation to Francis Harrison, the newly appointed governor general of the Philippine Islands. The cable dispatch included a message of hope that the Philippine Republic would be restored under the Wilson administration.⁸³ Actively trying to connect with the Democrats, Sotto joined a delegation to Japan to meet with Harrison.⁸⁴ On the Philippine front, four editors of Cebu newspapers—La Revolucion, El Precursor, Ang Kauswagan, and El Anunciador—sent a petition to the American governor general asking for Sotto to be pardoned. They argued that rapto was a common civil offence that was not clearly defined in the penal code and that the initial prosecution was of a political nature and mounted by Sotto’s enemies. The petitioners further argued that Sotto had already been amply punished by his seven years of exile and it was time for him to return to the Philippines where his talents could be put to good use in national reconstruction.⁸⁵ By early 1914, rumours flew across Manila regarding Sotto’s wish to return to the Philippines. A Manila newspaper reported his meeting with Philippine Vice-governor Henderson Martin at the office of The Philippine Republic. Sotto expressed his desire to return home and aid Filipino independence but Martin hesitated in taking further steps.⁸⁶ Sotto also sought assistance from a leader of the Philippine commission to negotiate with Harrison.⁸⁷

Not much is known of what came out of the negotiation, but Sotto’s dire financial state paved the path for his departure from Hong Kong. In April 1914, Sotto filed for bankruptcy.⁸⁸ Six months later, he boarded the Nikko Maru and returned to Manila. On the way, he told some passengers that he had received a tip from a Filipino politician that he would be pardoned after a two-month stint in the Bilibid prison.⁸⁹ Sotto was arrested upon his arrival, eventually spending five months in jail before he was pardoned by the governor general of the Philippines.⁹⁰

Certainly, the results of the American election opened new possibilities for Sotto’s homecoming, yet the Hong Kong government’s efforts in securing his safety, which did not align with the metropole’s, were undeniably crucial in making space for Sotto to continue his nationalist advocacies on British soil. What is notable here is the autonomy that the colonial authorities enjoyed in making decisions based on local—as opposed to imperial—interests, and the role that such autonomy played in enabling the liberty that Sotto enjoyed in his various personal and nationalist explorations. This sheds light not only on the multi-layered inter-colonial, inter-empire, and metropolitan-colonial reverberations that resulted from the activities of Filipino nationalists, but also on the fact that Asian radicals had nuanced hardships and struggles while campaigning on foreign soil. For Sotto, his problems were a mixture of his personal past in the Philippines and revolutionary pursuits in Hong Kong.

Conclusion

Did Vicente Sotto, a trained lawyer, use British Hong Kong to evade incarceration? For now, no evidence suggests this but he, like many Filipino nationalists exiled in Hong Kong, had faith in the British empire. Sotto explained to readers of the SCMP that under the British constitution, the executive power was distinct from the judicial, making it impossible to extradite him through diplomatic channels. As if forecasting his subsequent charges, he used his legal knowledge to declare: ‘My case is res judicata, and a new trial on the same alleged crime, would be a jeopardy.’⁹¹When the Hong Kong governor ordered the cancellation of the warrant for his arrest in late 1912, Sotto immediately commended British justice, stating, ‘[…] the British authorities neither wanted to lose time in res judicata, nor to turn their courts of justice into playthings or weapons for the vengeance of Americans’.⁹² Sotto’s experience in British Hong Kong had long-lasting impacts on his perception of the city and its people. At a banquet event, he was documented speaking of the intimate relationship between the Philippines and Hong Kong. Referring to his country as a ‘pretty girl’ abducted by ‘American imperialists’, he stated, ‘This charming little girl was born in English territory and therefore bears an English name.’⁹³ He was supposedly speaking of the period of exile Aguinaldo and the Junta spent in Hong Kong before they returned to establish the First Philippine Republic in 1898. Post-exile, Hong Kong remained close to Vicente Sotto’s heart. Not long after returning to the Philippines, he welcomed his fourth child whom he named ‘Britania’, as a gesture of gratitude to the Britons who had aided him in Hong Kong.⁹⁴ His struggle for press freedom, which emerged in British Hong Kong, continued to manifest in his pursuits. In 1917, Sotto was charged again with libel for the forty-first time as editor of a Manila weekly, The Independent.⁹⁵ By the time of his death, he had totted up 55 charges, mostly for libel and sedition, and was known for introducing a law to protect reporters, editors, and publishers from being compelled to reveal their news sources (Republic Act 53 of 1946, also known as the ‘Sotto law’).

Vicente Sotto’s life in exile is telling of the versatility embodied by modern Asian colonies, particularly in serving the interests of anti-colonial advocates, anti-imperial radicals, and/or nationalists. Hong Kong’s accommodation of other radicals and the city’s broad networks permitted Sotto to resiliently shift between these labels according to his circumstances: he arrived in Hong Kong a staunch anti-American advocate, briefly became a pragmatic pan-Asianist, and departed a politician ready to work with and for the American colonial authorities. By recounting his experience through a transimperial lens, we gain a more extensive understanding of the complexities of the Filipino nationalist movement in the early twentieth century. Sotto’s fluctuating visions of the future of the Philippines and his cooperation and discord with, and eventual distancing from, other Filipino radicals in Hong Kong reveals nuanced ideals for the Philippine Islands and its relationship with the United States. In 1914, Artemio Ricarte led a failed ‘Christmas eve rebellion’ in Hong Kong that was meant to uproot American imperialism from the Philippines; he subsequently fled to Japan where he was frequently visited by young Filipino students eager to start a race war of ‘coloured peoples’ to secure Philippine independence.⁹⁶ Sotto, being the realist he was, embraced his new mission to advance Philippine society under the auspices of the American government.

While the jurisdiction of Hong Kong under the British provided a buffer for Filipinos against the Spaniards, and later, the United States, the autonomy of the Hong Kong authorities, away from the imperial metropole, sustained and enabled the growth of Asia’s anti-imperial era. Significantly, this demonstrates the complex entanglements between two empires or more (the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan), two colonies (the Philippines and Hong Kong), as well as between colonies and metropoles (Hong Kong and London) wherein varying degrees of collaboration and conflict were taking shape. It also reveals the trans-Pacific and transimperial reverberations of revolutionary movements spearheaded by Asian radicals. In the vein of Jung’s argument that anti-imperial movements across the American empire bounced back to the United States in the shape of American national security issues and the rise of anti-Asian racism, Vicente Sotto’s failed requisition illustrates the collision between the American and British empires on Asian grounds.⁹⁷ These examples give us a lens through which to better understand nationalist activities in modern Asia as a global phenomenon propelled by local, colonial, and imperial forces. In a nutshell, Sotto’s presence in Hong Kong created waves that were felt on various planes: the colonial government’s sympathy for Sotto and refusal to follow advice from the imperial metropole created trouble with the Foreign Office, which in turn resulted in a brief episode of diplomatic tension between United States and the United Kingdom. Consequentially, these dynamics secured Sotto’s liberation and carved copious space for nationalist activities in colonial Hong Kong.

After he was released by the British court in 1912, Vicente Sotto wrote: ‘If the American Government reproduces its requisition in London, the British government will simply refer the matter to Hongkong […] As the case stands, I am safer in Hongkong than in the Philippines.’⁹⁸ On the surface, it reads as a simple ode of Filipino appreciation to the colony of Hong Kong, yet the complex entanglements that led to his conclusion speak volumes about the importance of re-seeing modern Asia’s anti-imperial era as more than a response to Western imperialism and colonial exploitations. Spanning more than one empire, the layers of internal and external developments that sculpted Vicente Sotto’s political trajectories ultimately reveal the cross-border fabric of ‘underground Asia’—sewn together by transimperial networks; empowered by the interstitial spaces between colony and metropole, and between empires; and driven by the revolutionary yet nuanced visions of an independent Asia.