Part I - Revolution in the Nanyang

Summary

Chinese immigrant communists who were members of the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) invented the national discourse of a multiethnic Malayan nation in 1930 through the medium of a semantic slippage of the Chinese word minzu (nation, nationality, ethnic group). The MCP, which mixed elements of a traditional Chinese association and a Bolshevik party, was a product of the ideological and organizational hybridization common to anti-imperialist organizations in Southeast Asia in the interwar global moment. The Malayan nationalism of the MCP built on the official nationalism of the British government and was shaped by Comintern ideas concerning the internationalism of national communist parties and by the need for political inclusion of immigrants in the Malayan body politic. This idea of a Malayan nation wherein nationalism and internationalism did not contradict each other was a derivative discourse originating in colonialism, though it became central to the Malayan nation after independence. The heterogeneous origins of the Malayan national concept highlight the ambiguities of nationalism and help us understand why this concept is still under debate today.

1 Prologue A Durian for Sun Yatsen

The world of Chinese migrant communists in Malaya is a window into interwar Chinese communist networks, which formed as Chinese communists in the Nanyang (南洋), the historical region of Chinese migration, the South Seas, spanning from Vietnam and the Philippines down to Indonesia and across the Malay Peninsula to Siam, founded communist cells and brought their compatriots to their adopted homes for employment. These networks were often built onto existing Chinese networks, and, in addition to being empowered by the Comintern, they were used by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Chinese Nationalist Party, the Guomindang (GMD), during the second united front period in the 1930s and 1940s, including for the recruitment of Eighth Route Army fighters in communist guerrilla areas in mainland China.¹ These networks also became launching pads for anti-Japanese guerrilla forces during the war in Malaya. Many members of these networks maintained connections with both the GMD and the communists in the Nanyang, as both parties continued to make a Chinese Revolution there, that is, a struggle for the political rights of the Chinese overseas, which had started in the time of Sun Yatsen. These Chinese intellectuals, mostly school teachers and journalists and editors, set for themselves the task of civilizing both the local Chinese, by making them more “Chinese” in terms of language and culture, and the locals, by liberating them from British imperialism together with the Chinese, whose economic and political rights were jeopardized by British policies.

In that world, the torn relationship between Chinese overseas, China, and their adopted motherland, as well as the longing to become local while preserving a unique form of Chineseness, is represented by the metaphor of the durian, a Southeast Asian fruit with a strong smell. In Chinese, the word for “durian” (榴 莲, liulian) is a homophone of the word for “to linger” (流连). A taste for durian foretold that a Chinese person who had come to the Nanyang was destined to stay. In 1928, Chinese writer Xu Jie (许杰), dispatched by the Central Committee of the GMD to work for the GMD newspaper A Paper for the Benefit of the Public (Yiqunbao) in Kuala Lumpur, imagined the smelly durian as a symbol of the stink of the Nanyang’s capitalist society and the money-oriented mentality of Chinese hawkers.² Thus, in the story of Zheng He, a Chinese Muslim explorer of Southeast Asia, the durian tree was said to have grown from a latrine. Publication of Xu Jie’s essay ridiculing Chinese migrants’ attachment to the durian was not allowed, and since Xu was not willing to sell out his ideals, as he explained, after struggling for one year, he decided to leave the stinky world of the Nanyang. But where, he asked, would he go to leave the world of capitalism?³ Around the same time, in 1932 the Singapore-born founder of Sun Yatsen’s Revolutionary Alliance, Zhang Yongfu, moved to China. In his recollection, Sun could not stand the durian either.⁴

Regardless of Sun’s taste for the durian in reality, Zhang’s reminiscence was intended to demonstrate Sun’s loyalty to China at a time when the GMD promoted the identification of overseas Chinese (huaqiao 华桥) with China. It was during this epoch that the Malayan Communist Party (Malaiya gongchandang) (MCP), consisting of former GMD and CCP members aiming to promote the Chinese Revolution, also attempted to mediate between the Chinese community and the local environments, and to indigenize by using the communist language of anticolonial liberation and by recruiting non-Chinese members into Chinese organizations. Amid the confusion of sojourning between China and the Nanyang, Chinese communists in Malaya organized themselves in ways both familiar, as Chinese organizations among sojourners had for centuries, and novel, as Bolshevik revolutionary parties. The result was a hybrid product of the interwar global moment, a mix of old and new, shaped by misunderstandings, miscommunications, and contingencies.

Although the MCP was a predominantly Chinese overseas organization, it was rooted in the regional historical experience of Southeast Asian forms of organization in response to a shared set of challenges that came with colonialism. Similar to 1920s’ Java, we can see in Malaya that a new sense of agency was expressed in languages and forms that were novel at the time, “but at the same time based on the old ones,” such as newspapers, rallies, strikes, parties, and ideologies.⁵ Similar to leftist Chinese immigrant intellectuals in Malaya, journalists in Java assumed new roles aside from being editors, writers, and commentators on readers’ letters: they talked at rallies and negotiated between the authorities and members of the political parties.⁶ Similar to the MCP’s translation of national categories, a transformation of the national consciousness, pergerakan, was a process of translation and appropriation that “allowed people to say in new forms and languages what they had been unable to say.”⁷ Similar to pergerakan, which involved the rise of Indonesian nationalism and the imagery of a free world in pan-Islamic and pan-communist terms, the MCP imagined its nation as part of a world liberated from colonialism.

In response to imperialism, across maritime Southeast Asia new ideas of nationalism and radicalism were grafted onto existing concepts and organizational forms, which shaped the hybridization of anti-imperialist and labor organizations. Independence ideas were translated through the religious appeal and social relevance of a Christian narrative among Philippine peasants into the early 1900s; the historical relationship between the middle-class leadership, landownership, the Catholic Church, and the revolutionary societies such as Katipunan, secret societies akin to Freemasonry, and early labor organizations⁸ resulted in the active participation of secret society members in the communist party. Javanese Muslims joined forces with the Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI) because communism offered the best way of practicing Islam.⁹ The worlds of Christianity, Islam, communism, and nationalism intersected. It was the Comintern’s Bolshevization that was to remedy such hybridity and, common to the communist parties of the 1930s, the divide between elite communists and labor movements and the party and “the masses.” Bolshevization also involved the adaptation of policies to local conditions, that is, indigenization.

The MCP’s history and the discourse of its Malayan nation were an illustration of the global connections of the interwar period and the products of the prevailing global trends of internationalization and indigenization, comparable with those of other international organizations such as Protestant missions and Buddhist organizations.¹⁰ In this ideological moment, to borrow from Cheek,¹¹ all three movements, although offering conflicting visions of modernity, had structural similarities and embraced nationalism. Thus, nationalism did not contradict internationalism. In the MCP and in the Philippines and Indonesia, the movement for independence was intertwined with globalist thinking in the form of Comintern internationalism, the pan-Asianism of Sun Yatsen, Christianity, Islam, and anarchism.¹²

In the context of the interwar internationalist moment,¹³ while the 1917 Revolution transformed the Russian empire into what Terry Martin has called the “affirmative empire” of Soviet nationalities,¹⁴ the internationalist Comintern acted through the only recognized “national” communist parties in the colonies to support and create nationalism. As the Comintern sought to break the world imperialist system through its “weakest link” in pursuit of a world proletarian revolution, in the context of societies with significant immigrant populations, the Comintern’s variant of internationalism created or built on existing discourses of multiethnic nations, similar to the Soviet republics.¹⁵

While the roles that the Comintern and Chinese communist organizations in Malaya played in indigenous nationalism were unique among Chinese communist organizations overseas, similarly, in the Dutch East Indies the first to use the marker “Indonesia” were communists.¹⁶ Also, Austrian communists were key in the shaping of nationalist discourses in a previously nonexistent nation.¹⁷ At the same time, in the interwar global moment and internationalist zeitgeist,¹⁸ the lack of contradiction between nationalism and internationalism in the MCP, as expressed in the Comintern’s promotion both of nations through the establishment of national parties and of a world revolution, fit the GMD and CCP’s aspiration for a world of equal nations. Through this discourse and the organization of a “national” party through an internationalist alliance of various ethnic groups, the MCP became both nationalist and internationalist. Thus, Malaya, similar to cosmopolitan China, in the words of Hung-Yok Ip, became an “internationalist nation.”¹⁹ Comintern internationalism helped to ground the “ungrounded empire” of Chinese networks in Malaya.²⁰

The MCP was one node in the international network of the 1920s and 1930s, throughout which we can see the operation of the global interwar networks of Chinese communists, of the Comintern, and of transnational anti-imperialism. Similarly, according to Michele Louro, when Nehru participated in the League Against Imperialism (1927), he viewed nationalism and internationalism as not mutually exclusive, and his distinction between nationalism and internationalism, India and the world, was blurred.²¹ Through the workings of this interwar globalization and the conjuncture of nationalism and internationalism in Chinese networks due to the nature of Chinese migration, which prompted overseas Chinese to be embedded in both sending and receiving environments and nationalism, the MCP’s nation under Chinese leadership in a multiethnic community illustrates the Chinese role in nationalism in Southeast Asia.

***

To explain the relationships among Southeast Asia, China, and the goals of a communist revolution in the 1930s, apart from a consideration of indigenous communist movements in Southeast Asia, we must consider the connections among three sides: the overseas Chinese, the huaqiao, shaped by the policies of their host governments; the Third Communist International or Comintern, run out of Moscow, with the Far Eastern Bureau (FEB) regional office in Shanghai; and China itself, including Sun Yatsen, GMD revolutionaries, and Chinese communists. Comintern networks were merely an added layer of a global network of Chinese sojourning communities in which Soviet ideology and, above all, nationalist Chinese communism were secondary to the survival behavior of the huaqiao community. This community was larger than families and smaller than the state, although it was trying to become the state in and of itself, and it promoted the anticolonial revolution in the region of the Nanyang. We see in what follows, as well, how these communities operated over long distances, and we gain insights into their organizational and justificatory structures.

Yet the earliest communist envoys in British Malaya were Sneevliet, Darsono, Semaun, and Baars, a group of Dutch and Indonesians from the Dutch East Indies who passed through Singapore in 1921–1922 on their way to and from Shanghai, Moscow, or Holland,²² as well as Bao Huiseng, a founding member of the CCP who worked in Malaya in 1922. Tan Malaka’s activity in 1924 in Singapore cooperating with Chinese and supported by the Comintern notwithstanding, after the defeat of the uprising in Java in 1926–1927, many PKI refugees, such as Alimin, Musso, Winanta, Subakat, and Jamaluddin Tamin, among others, fled through Singapore.²³ The paths of Indonesian and Chinese communists thus ran parallel in Malaya. Despite a small number of Malays in the MCP during the 1930s, the MCP was unable to solve what has usually been seen as its main problem, that is, its Chinese orientation. The party was unable to attract any significant non-Chinese membership, yet the party genuinely identified with Malaya.

Philip Kuhn’s conception of Chinese overseas as having a need to be doubly rooted in China and in their local environments helps make sense of the MCP’s dual nationalism.²⁴ In MCP texts, this is expressed in the multiple meanings of the word minzu as “nation,” “nationality,” “people,” and “national.” The concept of minzu moved between different meanings for different audiences at different times, and even between different meanings for the same audience at different times. However, this process of slippage in meaning is not the same as a misunderstanding. I show that the variant meanings of minzu were consistent and coherent within specific discursive domains. Similarly, Comintern ideas of “national” parties helped Chinese communists in Malaya secure their place in the Malayan nation, which the British government promoted at the time despite not granting Chinese immigrants political rights. The British government rather promoted one “Malayan” identity, which would be based on the common language, Malay or English, and a “love for the land.”²⁵

These circumstances were channeled through a translation slippage of the word minzu. In the following decade, in the ranges of different meanings employed by different actors in the revolution in the Nanyang, this notion of “nation” literally sojourned between Malaya and China in MCP discourse. As “sojourning” better describes this process, it does not imply the negative connotation that was associated with Chinese immigrants at the time, as sojourners who were not really present in a new place and were always outsiders in some fashion. However, scholarship on overseas Chinese has shown that “sojourning Chinese” contradicted this perception in their historical experience. Sojourning Chinese were emphatically part of their host societies. In the same fashion, the sojourning concept for minzu was both changed by and rooted in the discursive worlds it entered. This book maps this movement over time and through contemporary documents and demonstrates the actual mechanics and ways in which Chinese immigrant communists imagined the “nation.”²⁶ The enduring meaning and flexibility of the concept of minzu, which can be found only in the details, did not only reflect the historical change but also played a role that shaped history. Those details are a key part of my story.

The MCP’s story is a history of the conjuncture of words, concepts, and changed social experiences. Chinese in Shanghai and Singapore used Russian directives in English based on their often global experience in the late 1920s. Perched in their different environments, they assigned significantly different meanings to these borrowed words and concepts. The mechanism for this was twofold, conceptual and social. When speakers of different languages interpreted authoritative texts or generated their own texts 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) conjoined with the changed social experience of text writers and text readers to produce different meanings for the same words. I build on Koselleck’s Begriffsgeschichte (history of concepts) to map the social history of these meanings in the language.²⁷

Malayan Chinese communists’ adoption of the ideas of Comintern internationalism and of a national party was similar to the Hakka ethno-cultural group’s adoption of Christianity in Guangxi Province in the mid-nineteenth century, as they too had to assert their interests vis-à-vis the local population. In both cases, novel concepts and language effectively represented a change in the social experience of the local population. At the same time, as Kuhn has stressed, imported concepts and language (which, by the twentieth century, often came in the form of an integrated ideology) are not simply adapted to a new locality but also bring their own internal logic to the new environment. Thus, the novelty of an imported ideology (if it finds social efficacy) is twofold: it offers new ways to perceive and address the changed social reality, and it injects some new intentions and reasoning into a locality.²⁸ The case of the MCP’s Malayan nationalism offers a concrete look at the workings of ideological borrowing.

Minzu was a key word, one of the “significant, indicative words” that conveyed “strong feelings or important ideas” at the time, and despite nominal continuity in its general meaning, changes in its definition across cultural contexts were “radically different or radically variable, yet sometimes hardly noticed.” Raymond Williams tells us that these meanings are not confined to language but extend to “the users of language and to the objects and relationships” about which language speaks, and those “exist, indeed primarily, in material and historical ways.”²⁹

Language, central to the MCP story, defined how a nation was imagined and what a nation was to become. Slippages in meaning thus underlined the role of language in forming the basis for historical change and national consciousness. Yet language divisions impeded the MCP in its goal to become the (multi)national party of Malaya even while facilitating communication in transnational networks. The MCP’s “nation” is yet another example of the strategic use of Bolshevik language by various actors in the 1920–1930s and an example of how language formulations effected policies in the world of the Chinese Communist Party.³⁰ As minzu was translated between different languages and semantic fields, as in the case of comparable strategic adoption, where political power (real or symbolic) underpins the choice of meaning in “translingual practices,”³¹ ultimately, the consequences of the “semantic hybridity” of translated concepts across cultures and intersecting ideological and political fields³² were unintended. Marshall Sahlins’s concept of the structure of conjuncture, that is, meanings, accidents, and causal forces that shape conditions whose interactions in particular times and spaces seal the fates of whole societies,³³ is instructive to explain the case of the MCP’s Malayan nation, as during the same time period comparable ambiguities and fluidity in the meaning of the terms “country,” “ethnicity,” and “people” can be found in the contexts of Indonesia,³⁴ Japan,³⁵ and the Harlem Renaissance movement.³⁶

The MCP’s Malayan nation was one among other concepts of national belonging, as the Malayan community was multicultural and various actors experimented with ways to imagine a nation for those who lived in the Malayan peninsula in sultanates under British domination. For Malay-speaking Muslims, Indians who spoke South Asian languages, and those speaking the dialects of South China but writing in Mandarin, English, as the official language of the British government was the medium of communication. How does one imagine a community if the community speaks three or more languages?

Thus, it should not surprise us that the residents of British Malaya sought ways of imagining an inclusive community other than the single-language print capitalism described by Benedict Anderson, which, however, the British government successfully employed to imbue the idea of a Malayan nation in Chinese immigrants as well as a sense of common identity through Malay-language newspapers among Malays in the early 1930s.³⁷ Malay concepts of national belonging, such as bangsa, excluded immigrants, who in 1921 comprised half the population of British Malaya. Thus, these concepts could not appeal to the Chinese, who themselves comprised more than one-third of the population. Other imaginations that were comparable to national belonging and collective living in the Malay Peninsula, such as an Islamic community (umat) excluding non-Muslims, as a sultan-centered loyalty (kerajaan), and as a British Malayan nation, did not accommodate the political rights of a large immigrant population.³⁸ The MCP’s Malayan nation was to awaken as a proletarian multiethnic nation, similar to China as imagined by the Chinese communists,³⁹ run by an alliance of three communist parties representing the three largest communities of British Malaya, Chinese, Malay, and Indian, as the “national” Malayan Communist Party. However, the MCP is best understood as a “hybrid organization” with roots in older forms of Chinese associational life as well as in more novel forms and idioms of Bolshevization rather than as a mere pawn of the Comintern.⁴⁰

The heterogeneous origins of the Malayan national concept highlight the ambiguities of nationalism and help us to understand why this concept is still being debated today. After World War II, a form of territory-based civic nationalism among Chinese immigrants, which was invented by the intelligentsia (similar to the nationalism in Eastern Europe, Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, China, India, and even North America) in the 1930s and incorporated immigrant bourgeoisie into the nation, prevailed over the primordial ethnic (or perennial)⁴¹ Malay concept of national belonging based on language, rights to land, or loyalty to a sultan, and over the concepts of the larger communities of Islam and Greater Indonesia. More continuities and similarities exist between MCP attitudes, those of the GMD, and those of the postwar Malayan Chinese Association (MCA) with the incorporation of Chinese into the independent body politic of Malaya.

As in the majority of modern nation-states, several forms of nationalism, as defined by Anthony D. Smith, can be distinguished in the MCP’s Malayan nation as can elements of all three types of nationhood: as a bureaucratic incorporation, as a vernacular mobilization by the intelligentsia, and as plural nations built by settlers in North America and Australia.⁴² Malaya is thus an example of a constructed Southeast Asian nation where, as in other places in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, colonialism was a primary source of nationalism.⁴³ Similar to other nationalist movements, the MCP sought political power.⁴⁴ An imported concept, the MCP’s Malayan nation was an exemplary “derivative discourse” based on colonial borders and concepts.⁴⁵

As to the central question in studies of nationalism, which is, according to Hobsbawm, the criteria for nationhood, the MCP’s Malayan nation offers a complex answer.⁴⁶ It was invented, not as a tradition,⁴⁷ but rather as part of a novel national vision embedded in the interwar internationalist zeitgeist and in the British colonial discourse of the Malayan nation and Malayanization (a preferential policy, protection, and promotion of the Malay language) – that is, through state-sponsored top-down nationalism, as described by Ernest Gellner.⁴⁸ It was imagined by the Chinese émigré intellectuals for the Chinese community, similar to Anderson’s Latin American creoles, the contested pioneers of nationalism,⁴⁹ and indigenous Malays considered themselves to be excluded from the category of “Malayans.”⁵⁰ Chinese communists borrowed concepts and models from the Comintern, specifically concerning national parties and the principle of separate ethnic organizations among communists in the labor and communist movements in the United States. Those two models fit the local context because they allowed communists to imagine the nation promoted by the British government in a different way, one in which Chinese would have equal rights. Ultimately, the MCP’s Malayan nation was the beginning of the postwar phase of nationalism in Southeast Asia, described by Anderson as a response to global imperialism, led by bilingual intelligentsia and based on the distilled experience of European and American models.⁵¹

The MCP was shaped by unintended consequences and by the historical contingencies of anti-imperialism in Southeast Asia, Chinese long-term migration trends, network connections, identity and localization, organizational behavior originating in South China, Soviet and GMD geostrategic visions, and the organizational practices of the Comintern and the international communist movement. The efforts by the GMD, the CCP, and the Comintern in the making of a world revolution overlapped in Southeast Asia, and an independent “national” Malayan communist organization was established as the Chinese communists in Malaya sought the Comintern’s international legitimacy and finances (Chapter 2). Combined with a growing need for Chinese immigrants to adopt a Malayan identity and to create a distinct Nanyang Chineseness, this resulted in the MCP’s adoption of the discourse of an independent Malayan nation led by communists and including Chinese immigrants (Chapter 3). The MCP’s discourse and activities show its hybrid – and torn – nature. The MCP tried to act in the traditional role of Chinese associations as a broker between the Chinese and the British government and, at the same time, it campaigned for the overthrow of governments in Malaya and China (Chapter 4). A comparison with the Chinese immigrant organizations’ relation to local nationalism in the American Philippines and the Dutch East Indies demonstrates that the policies of the colonial governments toward the Chinese immigrants and the nuances of their identity shaped the involvement of the Chinese immigrants in the indigenous national project. Another unintended result of the MCP’s interaction with the Comintern and of their overlapping interests in the mobilization of locally born Chinese was the strengthening of Chinese communist networks in Southeast Asia (Chapter 5). The GMD’s nationalist education policies in overseas Chinese schools were responsible for the rising popularity of communist ideas in Malaya (Chapter 6). Chinese communists in Malaya succeeded because of their dual Chinese and Malayan nationalism and in spite of, not because of, their propaganda. Xu Jie’s durian story captures the main problem in the relationship between the MCP and the Chinese community, that is, the tensions between the business orientation of the community and the MCP’s radicalism, which was disastrous for its following by the beginning of the war (Chapter 7). Yet the experience of the Japanese occupation was crucial in shaping the Chinese community’s identification with the territory of sovereign Malaya.

This book is based on a collection of materials produced by the MCP and collected by the Comintern, now archived in Moscow at the Rosskiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial’no-politicheskoi istorii (Russian State Archive of Sociopolitical History) (RGASPI) and covering 1928–1935 and 1939–1941; MCP members’ memoirs from local literary and historical materials (wenshi ziliao), Chinese- and English-language periodicals from China and British Malaya, British Colonial and Foreign Office records that contain analytical reports and translations of MCP documents (which scholars sometimes regard as a “state perspective” and not as genuine MCP sources⁵²) as well as translations of press clippings from China; the materials of the Shanghai Municipal Police (SMP), including those at the National Archives and Records Administration (Washington, DC), as well as the GMD collection at the Hoover Archives. Because reports in Comintern correspondence are mostly signed by the Central Committee of the MCP, and only a few letters are signed by individuals, it is impossible, with rare exceptions, to attribute ideas and policies to certain individuals. This shortcoming thus migrated to this book, in which I have to refer to the Central Committee of the MCP (CC MCP) or, even worse, to the MCP or the Communist Youth League (CYL) as monolithic actors. Moreover, due to the inconsistent Romanization of different Chinese dialects as well as the large number of aliases that communists used, in many cases the Chinese characters for the names of people in Comintern sources cannot be determined.

***

In admission of my own commitments, I must state that I was born and raised in the Soviet Union. I had to join the Oktiabriata (Little Octobrist) and Young Pioneer organizations, but by the time I reached the age at which I would have joined the Komsomol (Communist Youth League), it was no longer mandatory. In school, we had to memorize the resolutions of party meetings in history classes. In university, my textbooks on the history of the “Ancient East” had quotes from Marx, Engels, and Lenin. When the Comintern was preparing to give 50,000 gold dollars for work in Malaya, my late grandmother, Anna Fedorovna Remizova, lived through famine in the Volga region in 1930–1932 and recalled how, as a child, she would go to the fields to look for edible plants. When I see requests for money in the letters from the Malayan communists to the Comintern, I think of my grandmother and of her father, who was arrested by the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (Narodnyi Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del) (NKVD) for hiding a Bible. All this, no doubt, translates into the detachment, even cynicism, with which I approach MCP texts.

I also believe, however, that my attention to the practical aspects of the relationship between the Comintern and the MCP is not unreasonable. As I show in this book, the MCP consciously manipulated rhetorical and organizational tools designed for mobilization while its members asked the Comintern for money. The members of the MCP were practical, even if they dreamed of a soviet federation of Malayan states in which they would form the government. Aspirations to make one’s way to power with weapons, even in the name of the “masses,” can hardly be called idealism. Nonetheless, my job as a historian is first to understand and explain how things came to pass. Judgment must await future research.

2 The Global World of Chinese Networks in the 1920s The Chinese Revolution and the Liberation of the Oppressed Minzu

“So we want to know where internationalism [shijiezhuyi] comes from? It comes from nationalism.”¹

From Global Trade to Global Emancipation: The Chinese Revolution in Moscow, Tokyo, Berlin, San Francisco, and Singapore

By the second half of the nineteenth century, Chinese migration had become a globalizing force of its own. The abolition of the transatlantic slave trade had created a demand for Chinese labor, and the opening of Chinese ports after the Opium Wars facilitated coolie trade to the Americas. Population crises and new opportunities across the globe, including the gold rush and the demand for indentured labor on plantations, pushed the Chinese from South China, who had a tradition of searching for opportunities overseas, to leave China for the British, Dutch, and Spanish colonies in the Americas and Southeast Asia, including sovereign Siam. Although the number of migrants is difficult to estimate because of inconclusive data, the 14.7 million departures from Xiamen, Shantou, and Hong Kong in 1869–1939 give an idea of the scale of the migration.²

Although localized centuries-old communities of Chinese were politically second class to the Europeans, they were involved in administration and helped govern the colonies. They “borrowed” the Dutch and British empires in Southeast Asia and were essential middlemen for the functioning of those empires.³ Chinese merchants had been rising to the position of rulers in the indigenous polities of today’s mainland Southeast Asia since the early second millennium. In Dutch and then British colonies, the Chinese had functioned as tax collectors, and they thrived on revenue farms until the late nineteenth century, particularly through the opium trade.⁴ Yet European discriminatory policies toward the alien migrant Chinese and toward the circulation of nationalist ideas made acquisition of a local identity desirable for the Chinese. In the second half of the nineteenth century in the Philippines, in addition to helping to form the basis of the Manila-centered Hispanicized culture, which led people to identify as “Philippine” versus “non-Philippine” after the American takeover, Chinese mestizos were seen as potential challengers to Spanish rule because of their strong economic status as landholders. Indeed, Chinese mestizos played an important role in the Philippine Revolution of 1896–1898, even if they did not identify as Chinese.⁵

In the meantime, emerging Chinese nationalism inside China resonated with and was amplified by the discriminatory policies of the colonial governments in overseas communities in Southeast Asia and in North American settler colonies. Despite the resentment of the Chinese overseas toward the Qing government for its inability to defend its subjects from the discriminatory policies of European colonial governments, they embraced Qing re-Sinicization efforts. From the establishment of Qing diplomatic representation and modern Chinese schools with Mandarin as the medium of instruction to the granting of patrilineal Chinese nationality beginning in 1909, the Chinese overseas sought to assert their Chinese and indigenous identities at the same time.

The Chinese nationalism of the early twentieth century is inseparable from the history of world anticolonial movements. The anticolonial struggles of Cuba and the Philippines, the Boer Wars, and the Asian migrant campaigns for rights in southern Africa, where the Chinese entered into an alliance with Indian migrants led by none other than Gandhi⁶ not only provided a stimulus for the development of Chinese nationalism but also set an organizational precedent for anti-imperialist leagues, which would become the mode of twentieth-century international anticolonial organizations and have been referred to as the precursors of the 1955 Bandung Conference.⁷ The earliest one, the American Anti-Imperialist League (1898–1920), was established in the United States to protest the annexation of the Philippines and Cuba, whereas the beginnings of anti-imperialist leagues in East Asia were found in pan-Asian societies in the early 1900s in Japan and Shanghai. The goals of Chinese nationalism at the turn of the century included both the solution of China’s problems and the making of a world of independent nations. Liu Shipei, a member of the Indo-Chinese Asian Solidarity Society (Yazhou heqinghui) in Tokyo (1907), pointed out the importance of the solidarity of the “weak peoples” (ruozhong) of Asia in the confrontation between China and Asia and the imperialism of Japan and the West.⁸

In these new networks of the transnational Save the Emperor Society (Baohuanghui) in the early 1900s and of the GMD and the CCP in the 1920s, preexisting ideas and aspirations for an interconnected just world were linked to new ideas of national identity and of a world communist revolution. These ideas were transported to diasporic networks, where long-held Chinese migrant ideas about the need for assimilation into local societies and policies of re-Sinicization were at work. Given the history of Chinese ideas about global interconnections, expressed in ancient concepts such as Tianxia, “All under Heaven,” and Datong, “Great Unity,” the pan-Asian ethos of the Chinese Revolution, and Sun Yatsen’s own discussions of internationalism (shijiezhuyi) stemming from nationalism, and the convergence of nationalism and internationalism in the May Fourth Movement, is not surprising.⁹

The first Comintern agent in Asia was Dutchman Henricus Sneevliet, who founded the first communist party in Asia, the Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI), in 1920 and modeled cooperation between the CCP and the GMD after cooperation between Indonesian communists and Islamic nationalists. He critically reflected that many GMD members linked Chinese traditional philosophy with socialist ideas.¹⁰ For instance, the Datong party originated from the New Asia Alliance (Xin Ya tongmengdang) established by Chinese and Koreans in 1915 in Japan. The Comintern affirmed that the vision of “human equality and international harmony” and the anti-imperialist aspirations of Korean and Chinese members of the Datong party who sought Comintern support in founding the Korean and Chinese communist parties in 1920–1921 were socialist and were on the way to “becoming communist.”¹¹ However, members of the Datong party were unsuccessful in founding a Comintern-supported Chinese communist party because they lacked the reputation and organizational skills of Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao. Also, as was often the case in the world of slow and unreliable 1920s transportation, they were late for the Third Comintern congress in June 1921 and could not join the group of official representatives of China who would establish the CCP the following month in the presence of Sneevliet.¹² The Datong party did not become the communist party of China, but these ideas permeated the world of Chinese communism, especially as the global expansion of Chinese organizations facilitated their further development.

In 1924, Sun Yatsen postulated in his lectures on nationalism that only if China returned to its historical policy of “helping the weak” (ji ruo fu qing) and opposing the strong and allied itself with the polities in the former Chinese sphere of influence, which had been lost to European colonial encroachment, would China be able to rise to power again.¹³ New ideas of Asian unity in juxtaposition to the West and traditional ideas of China’s role as a benevolent patron in the region, which Sun Yatsen called the kingly way (wangdao) as opposed to the hegemonic ways of Western powers (badao),¹⁴ were channeled into new anticolonial liberation ideologies and institutionalized in communist networks. Sun’s ideas evolved from China’s geopolitics and were shaped by anti-colonial wars in the Philippines, Africa, and Cuba and by Lenin’s 1918 discourse on the oppressed peoples and Bolshevik foreign policy as well as by the failure of the Versailles Treaty to solve the colonial question.

Sun Yatsen imagined the way to China’s revival as a world power was through an alliance with Japan or with the oppressed nations of Asia. Together with Mongolia, India, Afghanistan, Persia, Burma, and Annam, China would form a federation, a Great State of the East (Dongfang daguo). In 1924, Sun Yatsen defined pan-Asianism as “the question of what suffering Asian nations should do in order to resist the powerful nations of Europe – in other words, the great question focused on the elimination of injustices towards oppressed peoples.”¹⁵ Sun’s “oppressed nations” were not only former Chinese vassals, friendly neighbors, and decolonized countries in the Americas but also Soviet Russia and post-Versailles Germany. The second anti-imperialist league, the League Against Imperialism (LAI), established with Comintern funding, began as the Hands-Off China Society created by Workers International Relief, based in Berlin.

Germany had a special place in Sun’s vision. In 1923, Sun harbored the idea of a three-country alliance wherein the Soviet Union would provide ideology and Germany would provide military technology and advisors to China. Sun planned that once China had restored its position as a powerful nation, it would help Germany restore its position, which had been undermined by the Versailles Treaty.¹⁶ The German branch of the CCP (Lü De zhibu), established in 1922, became the Chinese-language faction of the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (KPD) (Degong Zhongguo yuyanzu) in 1927, one of the leaders of which was Liao Chengzhi, a celebrated leader of the international Chinese seamen organization and the son of assassinated GMD leader Liao Zhongkai.¹⁷

Germany did not have a large Chinese labor community, but German communists treated Chinese students as China’s national voice. In response to the German branch of the CCP’s protest letter regarding Reuters’s report that the May Thirtieth Movement in China was yet another expression of Chinese xenophobia and another Boxer Uprising, newspapers published a retraction the following day and arrested Chinese students, participating in KPD-organized rallies against British imperialism and in support of China, received police apologies and were let go. Among them were Liao Huanxing, the future secretary of the LAI’s international secretariat and a Comintern cadre in Berlin who had been dispatched originally by the British GMD to establish a branch there, and the future leader of the People’s Liberation Army, Zhu De.¹⁸

In 1927, at the Brussels inaugural congress of the LAI, a world congress of nationalist organizations, one-fifth of all representatives came from the GMD.¹⁹ Initially, the GMD Central Committee decided to appoint Hu Hanmin, who had just returned from his Moscow trip during which he had advocated for GMD membership in the Comintern independently of the CCP, as the GMD’s representative to the first LAI congress. Liao, as Hu’s assistant, was to go in his place if Hu could not make it. In the meantime, in 1923 Liao started to work as a referent for the Varga Bureau in Berlin, the information office of the Comintern for Western Europe. He acted as a self-appointed representative of all worker parties of China at the Brussels congress,²⁰ at which he quoted Sun Yatsen’s plea that the GMD unite with the oppressed classes of the West and with the oppressed nations of the world to oppose oppressors and imperialists.²¹ The LAI congress in 1927 devoted special attention to China. It is not difficult to see how the Chinese discourse on an alliance of oppressed peoples would be attractive among some circles in Germany, given Sun Yatsen’s support of the German cause. The KPD election campaign in competition with the Nazis against the peace at Versailles in the early 1930s, which was allegedly initiated by Stalin,²² reflected the mood of postwar Germany. A GMD cadre reported the following in 1929 about the situation in Germany to the GMD Central Committee:

After the Great War, Germany was repressed by the Versailles Treaty and dared not offend other nations. Thus, their foreign policy is very prudent. Furthermore, the Sino–German unequal treaties were abolished long ago. Recently, attempting to gain our country’s markets in order to compete with other countries, they have mostly expressed sympathy with our nationalist movements (the Germans call themselves an oppressed nation, so they want very much to ally with weak and small nations in order to rise again). [Their sympathy] does not really come from the heart, but temporarily they do not constitute a big obstacle to our country either … The KPD previously had positive feelings toward us and were enthusiastic in aiding us.²³

Although the GMD cadre had reservations about the colonialist impulses lying behind Kaiser Wilhelm’s ambitions in Asia as a motivation for the KPD to aid the Chinese Revolution, it is clear from the letter that the GMD’s own motivation in its alliance with the KPD was strategic. Despite antipathy to foreigners among working-class supporters of the KPD and the KPD’s own use of China in its domestic political struggle,²⁴ KPD leaders extended a warm welcome to arriving Chinese communists and students.²⁵ In the soul searching of post-Versailles Germany, there was an intellectual fascination with China as a model of a nation that had changed dramatically and rapidly through revolution.²⁶

In the meantime, in Canton in 1925 Liao Zhongkai and Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh established an anti-imperialist league (AIL)²⁷ consisting of Vietnamese (“Annamites”), Koreans, Indians, and Javanese. This organization became the breeding ground for the key Vietnamese Marxist organization, the Association of Vietnamese Revolutionary Youth (Thanh Niên).²⁸ In 1927, the Union of the Oppressed Peoples of the East (Dongfang bei yapo minzu lianhehui) began to operate in Hankou and Shanghai, drawing membership from migrants of the same countries.²⁹ Vietnamese sources suggest that the GMD established the Shanghai AIL to wrest the leadership of the Asian communists from the Comintern.³⁰ Whether or not this is true, GMD attempts to join the Comintern in 1923–1927, promoted by Hu Hanmin among others, were pragmatic, aiming to realize the party’s vision of a world revolution.³¹ Hu hoped to convert the Comintern into a global organization as an “International of Nationalities” (minzu guoji), alluding in the name to the “Third [Communist] International” (Disan guoji [gongchandang]), the Comintern, and with the GMD playing the leading role. Hu put this as follows:

In the days when Zong Li [Sun Yatsen] was alive, I contend that he proposed to organize a minzu guoji [International of Nationalities]³² so that we, the Guomindang, could lead the international national revolutionary movement [lingdao guoji de minzu geming yundong] ourselves; when I went to Russia [in 1926] and suggested that the Guomindang become a Comintern member directly, I wanted the Guomindang to independently join the Comintern, acquire [independent] status, and not be subjected to communist control and secret dealings. So the idea to organize a minzu guoji and the idea to join the Comintern were consistent with each other and were in the same spirit … Frankly, my proposal to join the Comintern was because I hoped to organize a minzu guoji.³³

In the geopolitical imagination of China’s two anti-imperialist parties, the CCP and the GMD, both organizationally structured after a Bolshevik party and striving for a one-party dictatorship, the restoration of China’s power in its former imperial borders held an important place. Just as the Bolsheviks drew on tsarist imperial borderland policies, the CCP inherited the imperial borderland policies of the Qing dynasty as well as GMD internationalism, aspiring to liberate together the Chinese and indigenous peoples, in addition to appropriating Comintern internationalism.³⁴ In 1928, a CCP program prepared by Hungarian Eugen Varga, a renowned Soviet economist and the head of the Information-Statistical Institution of the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI) in Berlin, included the restitution of the territories “seized by imperialists,” such as “Formosa, Indochina, Manchuria, etc.,” along with the abolition of the unequal treaties and the return of the concessions.³⁵ Varga’s information on China was provided by Liao Huanxing.³⁶

At the same time, the GMD was developing its overseas organizations and was promoting the anti-British cause among overseas Chinese. As a result of the Comintern policy of cooperation between the two parties, many CCP members had dual CCP and GMD membership. At the second national convention of the GMD in Canton in 1926, delegates from Malaya, Java, Burma, Siam, and Indochina planned the establishment of the Overseas Chinese Communist Division. Their goal was unity of the Chinese in the Nanyang and propaganda of emancipation among the “small weak races” (i.e., the indigenous peoples).³⁷ In 1926–1927, the GMD organized classes for overseas Chinese (huaqiao xuexiban) propaganda cadres who were to lead the overseas Chinese movement (huaqiao yundong) in Malaya.³⁸

During the interwar period, various international organizations, such as those of Protestant missionaries and Buddhists, which offered different visions of modernity, had structural similarities. They embraced internationalism and indigenization (involving locals in the organizations to put down roots in local chapters) as their modi operandi.³⁹ By the 1930s, these well-established trends could also be seen in the promotion of the Chinese Revolution by the Comintern and by the GMD and the CCP. These two parties’ overseas branches were hybrids of Chinese overseas organizations and political parties and had the need to localize so as to fit in better with local society.⁴⁰ As the Comintern sought to expand its organization, promoting global solidarity of the working class and world revolution, it also adopted indigenization strategies.

The Comintern, Nationalism, and Southeast Asia

The internationalism of the Comintern in the 1920s was one of many expressions of internationalism by transnational organizations in the interwar world, and it channeled the regional and national aspirations of anticolonial movements. Following the Bolsheviks’ international isolation of 1919, the Second Comintern Congress promoted nationalities and the colonial question in 1920. At the same time, various groups of Asian immigrants in Soviet Russia made efforts to advance the communist movement in Asia. Prior to the establishment of the Comintern office in China, the union of Chinese laborers in Russia established its own bureau of Chinese communists within the Russian communist party, the Bolsheviks, in 1920 and petitioned the Soviet government to send representatives to China. Chinese and Korean communists also approached the Comintern with suggestions to organize Comintern-supported parties. Contingency and luck were often decisive factors through which organizations became national communist parties. Thus, the initiatives of the members of the bureau of Chinese communists within the Russian communist party, who referred to themselves as the Chinese Communist Party, to organize their branches in Shanghai and Tianjin would have been approved by the Comintern in December 1920, if not for the death of the head of the party, Liu Qian.⁴¹

Ideas of national liberation were intertwined with pan-regional concepts. In 1923, Indonesian communist leader Tan Malaka envisioned a federation of Eastern communists.⁴² In 1924, members of the French Communist Party’s Union Intercoloniale African, Lamine Senghor, and Ho Chi Minh established the Ligue de Défense de la Race Nègre. In 1927, they attended the inaugural congress of the LAI in Brussels. In the 1920s, the Comintern’s support of the African cause by proposing to create a belt of black states within the United States, South Africa, Brazil, and Cuba in the manner of the invention of new nations in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) as soviet republics channeled African diasporic intellectuals’ pan-Africanism.⁴³ The idea of an indigenous nation-state, like Wilson’s self-determination slogans of a few years earlier, held great appeal in the colonized world.⁴⁴

Tan Malaka, a proponent of a pan-Asian communist network, and Sneevliet, defining his mission as to bring Marxist prophecies to China and to connect the Chinese movement with the international network, shaped the Comintern’s approach in the region. The Comintern sent Sneevliet to Shanghai in March 1921 to study the “movement in different countries in the Far East” so as to establish an office there. Sneevliet was impressed by the labor movement in South China and proposed connecting the movements in the Philippines, Indochina, and the Dutch East Indies with British India because of their similarities.⁴⁵ The Eastern Department of the ECCI was responsible for deciding the “guiding line” in the Malay Archipelago. This line was based on Sneevliet’s proposal to ECCI representative Tan Malaka, who had the task of building connections between the anti-imperialist movement in Indonesia and “all countries of the East,” especially with the “national liberation movement in China,” by building their organizations in the Malay Archipelago, Indochina, Siam, and Singapore.⁴⁶ Singapore was intended to be the platform to bring together the communist movements of China and Indonesia, including the movements of the overseas Chinese.⁴⁷ In 1923, with the rise of radicalism in Java, the most populous Indonesian island of the Dutch East Indies, Moscow started to strategize with regard to the Dutch East Indies. For the Comintern, the Malay Archipelago was an important strategic position between the Pacific and Indian Oceans, “near the most populated countries of the globe – China and India.”⁴⁸

Sun Yatsen’s alliance with the Soviet Union in 1923 and his ideas of anti-British pan-Asian unity matched Soviet plans for an alliance in the Far East.⁴⁹ Sneevliet’s and Malaka’s visions fit the international needs of the Soviet state. In 1923, in order to subvert the influence of British imperialism in China and Singapore, the Comintern planned to establish the “most important element of the anti-imperial struggle,” an organization of transport workers linking South China, the Malay Archipelago (Java and Sumatra), Indochina, Singapore, and Siam in order to stimulate a national revolutionary movement “in the deep interior of international imperialism on the Pacific coast and islands.” Propaganda in native languages (newspapers) would be launched from some port in the Pacific to develop a “national revolutionary movement.” Tan Malaka, posing as “a journalist from a national bourgeois paper so that he could legalize himself and as a nationalist could do a lecture tour against imperialism,” would be dispatched to establish communist cells in Java, Singapore, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Canton, and Shanghai. On the basis of information supplied via this communication channel through Vladivostok to Moscow, the Eastern secretariat would provide a guiding line to printing offices in Singapore and Hong Kong.⁵⁰

In 1924, Tan Malaka reported from his grand Asian tour, sponsored by the Comintern, that in Singapore, a Comrade L. had sufficiently established a school of 100 students and had made connections among plantations and “town workers.” Echoing Sneevliet, Malaka suggested that Singapore offered a chance to work not only in Malaya but also in India because it was “not very far” and because of the large number of Indian migrant workers in Singapore.⁵¹ To promote a united front between the Chinese and Javanese, Tan Malaka had a plan to establish with “Comrade Tan” a Java–China special committee in Canton to study Chinese conditions in Java and to work among the “politically and economically important Chinese population.” Consisting of one member each from Hong Kong, Canton, and Java (including Malaka himself), this committee, which was established in June 1924 but was short lived, would build connections with the Javanese party and design policy for the Sino–Java Committee in Java. A graduate of the Whampoa Military Academy was to leave for Java to work as a teacher.⁵² In Singapore, however, Malaka found that Chinese and Indians were more responsive to communist ideas than were the local Indonesian and Malay communities.⁵³ In response to Malaka’s request, experienced organizer Fu Daqing and a Hainanese labor organizer were dispatched to Singapore to organize Hainanese plantation laborers, among whom Cantonese-speaking Comrade L. was useless.⁵⁴ During a visit in 1925, PKI leader Alimin Prawirodirdjo, who did not speak Chinese, was reportedly able to recruit only Chinese and Indian laborers, yet the number of Indonesian communists did increase there when many fled to Singapore following the suppression of the 1926–1927 PKI uprising.⁵⁵

Aside from two Profintern “agents” who published a newspaper in Singapore in 1924,⁵⁶ a number of members of the Nanyang CCP organization studied in Moscow in the 1920s. These included Han Guoxiang; Yang Shanji, head of the Communist Youth League (CYL) in 1926 and the secretary of the Nanyang Provisional Committee (NPC) in 1928 (see Figure 2.1); Chen Yannian, son of Chen Duxiu;⁵⁷ and Xu Tianbing, a member of the older generation of the Revolution of 1911.⁵⁸ Fu Daqing, a member of the Guangdong Provincial Committee and the head of the NPC’s propaganda department, studied in Moscow in 1922–1924. He also participated in the Nanchang and Guangzhou uprisings as well as in Lenin’s funeral, and he was Borodin’s interpreter at the same time that Ho Chi Minh was Borodin’s secretary.⁵⁹ The NPC received either CCP or Comintern money occasionally. Once, after the fall of 1929, Fu Daqing’s subsidy saved the editorial board of the Nanyang Worker from starving for four days.⁶⁰

Figure 2.1 Yang Shanji, 1924. Born in Hainan, head of the Communist Youth League (CYL) in 1926 and secretary of the Nanyang Provisional Committee in 1928 during his studies at the University of the Toilers of the East in 1924.⁶¹

Published with permission of the RGASPI.

The defeat of the communist uprising in the Dutch East Indies in 1926 shaped the Comintern’s approach to Singapore and Malaya. They were to be the basis from which to resurrect the Indonesian party and to build an intra-Asian network. At the same time, the Chinese Communist Party also started as a multicentered movement and expanded globally in the late 1920s.⁶²

The Global World of the Chinese Revolutionaries

Since the turn of the twentieth century, the ideas and organizational modes of Chinese networks had traveled across the world. Workers returning from the United States to China brought with them the modes of unionizing and striking, which they then used in Hong Kong and China in Sun Yatsen’s organization.⁶³ In the 1920s, the founding members of the CCP and the first generation of GMD envoys of re-Sinicization were dispatched around the world. Dong Chuping (董锄平), alias Dong Fangcheng (董方诚), visited Cuba in 1925, as well as a Philippine university together with Bao Huiseng, who had previously worked in Malaya in 1922.⁶⁴ The newspaper Datongbao was first published by the Chinese workers’ union in Soviet Russia in 1918 and commissioned by the Soviet government to propagate the Russian Revolution and Marxism among Chinese workers, but the title was chosen in a way that would attract Chinese readers. After the Chinese laborers who published Datongbao in Russia returned to China, they established the Datong society,⁶⁵ the newspaper of which was also published in the Philippines.⁶⁶

The activities of the LAI were closely intertwined with the activities of the Chinese revolutionaries. For example, the first Chinese communist organization in the United States was established after contact with the LAI network. A member of the American communist party, Ji Chaoding, alias C. T. Chi, represented the Students’ Society for the Advancement of Sun Yatsenism in America and the American Anti-Imperialist League at the Brussels World Anti-Imperialist Congress as well as at the International Congress of Oppressed Peoples in 1927. Upon returning, he, Shi Huang, and Xu Yongyin⁶⁷ established a Chinese-language faction (Meigongdang zhongyang fushu Zhongguoju)⁶⁸ under the anti-imperialist committee of the American party.⁶⁹ After breaking with the GMD in 1927, the Chinese faction planned to take over the anti-imperialist activities of leftist GMD organizations in the United States, Canada, Cuba, and Mexico through branches of the Alliance for the Support of the Chinese Workers and Peasants Revolution in America (ASCWPRA) across the United States and in Havana. A revolutionary tradition of Chinese participation in the Cuban national independence struggle dated back to the Cuban war of independence, and local Cuban leaders such as Jose Marti had included the Chinese in internationalist solidarity and in the pan-American vision.⁷⁰As Chinese communists borrowed the regional imagination of the Monroe Doctrine, their goals were to promote cooperation of Chinese and American workers and pro-China policies, such as the abolition of the unequal treaties as well as the interests of Chinese immigrants.⁷¹

Chinese revolutionary networks helped staff regional Comintern organizations in the Americas through connections between the Chinese faction and party members in Cuba, the Philippines, Canada, Chile, Mexico, and Peru.⁷² The All-American Anti-Imperialist League (AAAIL) was reestablished by the Workers Party of America with Comintern authorization in 1925, but in 1927 it existed only on paper.⁷³ The All-American Alliance of Chinese Anti-Imperialists (est. 1928) consisted of Asian immigrants and established the Oriental branch of the American Anti-Imperialist League in 1929.⁷⁴ That same year, the ASCWPRA participated in the second anti-imperialist world congress in Frankfurt and joined the LAI.⁷⁵

A Chinese cadre on the Comintern – likely Wang Ming, who was the Moscow liaison for the Chinese section of the CPUSA⁷⁶ – suggested that the Chinese faction should become the center of huaqiao work in the Americas by recruiting avant-garde members of the AIL into the party and establishing local CCP cells. The Chinese faction was to help the parties in the Americas in organizing the huaqiao but was not to build local parties in Mexico or Canada. The Chinese faction acted as a liaison between the Comintern and the CCP, as this Chinese Comintern cadre asked the Chinese faction to forward to Moscow or Paris the materials from the CCP.⁷⁷ Chinese communists in Europe sent Comintern publications to Chinese communists in the United States, who in turn sent copies of The Chinese Vanguard (Xianfengbao) to Europe and to the LAI and to party propaganda to Malaya. Additionally, Chinese students such as Un Hong Siu, sponsor of the MCP, translated party publications into Chinese, as discussed in Chapter 6.⁷⁸

By 1928, Comintern activities aiming to bring workers to power internationally had ended in defeat in Europe and Asia alike. While in 1924 the Comintern had attributed this failure to the stabilization of world capitalism, at its Sixth Congress in 1928 the Comintern announced the beginning of a new Third Period of the “class against class” struggle.⁷⁹ The Comintern no longer encouraged legal methods through parliaments and the press as a strategy for communist parties, and cooperation with moderate labor movements and social democrats was banned. Instead, the Comintern started to establish communist parties in the colonies as a way of undermining European imperialism through its “weakest link.”⁸⁰ Such a shift would have come as no surprise given the successful launch of the anti-imperialist league project, for even if its results were modest at best, the scope of its ambitions was captivating.

Old Networks, New Ideas: The Nanyang Organization

Because of the demand for labor after World War I in the colonies and because of easy travel, the Nanyang was a popular destination for “progressive Chinese and revolutionaries” (Zhongguo de jinbu de renshi he gemingzhe).⁸¹ In 1921–1925, journalists and teachers, GMD and often CCP members, spread the ideas of the May Fourth Movement and found employment with Chinese schools and newspapers in the Nanyang. Various organizations, including the GMD, the Guangdong CCP and CYL, the All-China General Labor Union, the Shanghai Student Federation, and the Kheng Ngai Revolutionary Alliance (Qiongya geming tongzhi datongmeng), sent envoys to promote both the ideas of the Chinese Revolution and anti-British sentiments among the overseas Chinese.⁸² The head of the Overseas Bureau of the GMD in China, older Tongmenghui member Peng Zemin, dispatched cadres to organize local student unions, labor unions, and GMD branches in the Nanyang Chinese Union of Public Societies (Nanyang huaqiao ge gongtuan lianhehui) so as to promote the anti-British cause.⁸³ Such propaganda was especially relevant in the aftermath of the so-called May Thirtieth Incident, during which several student participants in the protests against Japanese business owners were killed by the police of the International Settlement in Shanghai, and which led to worldwide growth of CCP membership.

In 1925, All-China General Labor Union cadres in Singapore established worker night schools and unions among seamen and servants in foreigners’ houses – who, in the English version of the document, were given the dramatic title of “foreign affairs workers” (waiwu, 外务).⁸⁴ In 1926, more than 300 students and workers in Singapore were involved with the communists.⁸⁵ The Nanyang regional committee of the CCP (Zhongguo gongchandang Nanyang qubu weiyuanhui), covering British Malaya and the Dutch East Indies, and the CYL of about 300 members were formed in Malaya in 1926, but their organizational relationship with the CCP was ambiguous.⁸⁶ Hainanese trade guilds were the first to display communist sentiments in the 1920s when labor unions took shape, and Hainanese dominated unions of rubber tappers, domestic servants, shoemakers, carpenters, seamen, and mechanics.⁸⁷ The driving forces behind communist organizations in Malaya were Hainanese members of the leftist GMD, who were teachers at night schools (known as the Main School), although they did not have permanent headquarters. They instead organized student unions and spread propaganda and Chinese nationalism among workers’ unions. Acting within their Nanyang jurisdiction, they discussed the failed uprising in the Dutch East Indies at their meetings.⁸⁸ In 1927, the founder of the CYL, Pan Yunbo (潘云波), attended the Pan-Pacific Trade Union Conference in Hankou where he likely learned the ideas of communist organizations around the world, including the model of separate ethnic organizations in the United States.⁸⁹

After the CCP’s defeat in China in April 1927 at the hands of the Guomindang, especially after the Canton uprising, many CCP members fled to the Nanyang. The majority of refugee communists settled in Malaya because it was easier to establish party cells and labor unions there, where the Chinese were sympathetic to the Chinese Revolution and more “relatively progressive” (bijiao jinbu) than in places where the GMD was strong, similar to Siam. Others went to Indochina and to Palembang in Sumatra.⁹⁰ In 1928, the Nanyang CCP was renamed the Nanyang Provisional Committee of the CCP (Zhongguo gongchandang Nanyang linshi weiyuanhui), reflecting the fact that the committee’s relationship with the CCP was being established because of the CCP’s destruction after April 1927.⁹¹

The jurisdiction of the committee was as ambiguous as the boundaries of the Nanyang itself, which included all of mainland and maritime Southeast Asia.⁹² The predominantly Hainanese organization consisted of the members of the Nanyang General Labor Union (NGLU), the night schools, and the Nanyang CYL. The committee consisted of thirteen persons, mainly Hainanese, including a five-member standing committee.⁹³ The committee was to direct local committees (diwei) in Singapore, Penang, Malacca, Johor, Kuala Lumpur, Seremban, Ipoh, Sungai Lembing, Riau in the Netherlands East Indies (NEI), Selangor, Negeri Sembilan, Terengganu, Kelantan, Palembang (Sumatra), and Siam, with subcommittees for labor, propaganda, the armed forces, women, finance, and relief.⁹⁴ In October 1928, the party had 600 members.⁹⁵

In 1929, the NPC included secretaries Zhang Chengxiang (张成祥) and Xu Tianbing (徐天炳), also known as Wu Qing (吴青); Chen Sanhua (陈三华); Fu Daqing (傅达庆), head of the propaganda department; and Wei Zhongzhou (魏忠洲), head of the secretariat. The editorial board of Nanyang Worker (Nanyang gongrenbao), with the exception of Zhang Chengxiang, lived in the secretariat’s office and posed as a huaqiao family. The Chinese and English publications of Nanyang Worker were in demand; its distribution increased from several hundred copies to 2,000. Although there was one comrade from Siam, as well as A-Fu, a sixteen-year-old who spoke fluent Malay and was indispensable for party operations, the NPC focused on China. At party meetings, which were held once or twice a month or every other month, the NPC held theoretical discussions about Marxism-Leninism and the crisis of capitalism as well as the reasons for the failure of the Chinese Revolution. It also handled routine questions about party fees, the recruitment of new members, the establishment of a revolutionary mass organization, patriotic propaganda, and international education among overseas Chinese, and complained about the low cultural level of workers in night schools.⁹⁶

Singaporean leaders paid rare visits to the Malay states and had little influence there.⁹⁷ Front organizations of the NPC were the NGLU, the AIL, the CYL, and the Nanyang General Seamen Union, all of which had overlapping leaderships. The NPC leaders were often arrested and deported by the British authorities, especially after bombings during a shoemakers’ strike and assassination attempts on visiting GMD officials in 1928, when one of the bomb throwers was found to be in possession of communist literature. Although the strike was preceded by the formation of a shoemakers’ union as an affiliate of the NGLU, and the NPC was assumed to have been behind the strike, the MCP in its later correspondence with the Comintern blamed the bombings on the “masses.”⁹⁸ Thus, the NPC’s role remained uncertain. The NPC also piggybacked on the anti-Japanese boycott and the campaign organized by the Chinese community to commemorate the GMD’s retreat from Ji’nan, known as the Ji’nan Incident.⁹⁹ In 1928, the Straits Times reported that the communists had “good organization, clever leaders, and the will to progress.”¹⁰⁰

As we have seen, the CCP’s local organization in Malaya was shaped by the historical trends of Chinese migration and the political forces in China as well as by the interwar global and Southeast Asian communist connections. The need of Chinese organizations to indigenize so as to fit in better with local society matched the need for the localization of Comintern operations.

World Revolution, Chinese Revolution: Indigenization and Internationalization

Since the emergence of Chinese nationalism in the late nineteenth century, Chinese community organizations had been concerned with bringing in and representing not only Chinese. The MCP’s impulse to involve non-Chinese in its activities paralleled the impulses not only of newly emerging Chinese organizations like the GMD but also of organizations with longer histories, such as temples. In 1893, the leader of the Chinese community in Kuala Lumpur, Kapitan Cina (Chinese Captain) Yap Ah Loy, founded a temple dedicated to the previous Kapitan, and the processions of the temple included Indians and Japanese along with headmen of Chinese subethnic groups. Yap Ah Loy sought to portray himself as representing not only the Chinese but the wider community as well.¹⁰¹

During the 1920s, the GMD further put into practice its earlier Asianist ideas of the liberation of the oppressed peoples. Since 1927, efforts by Chinese political organizations to embed themselves in their host environments had been evident in the left-wing GMD and in the CCP’s Nanyang Provisional Committee, as both had called for local non-Chinese in British Malaya, that is, Malays, Javanese, and Tamils,¹⁰² to be involved in a united movement for liberation from colonial oppression.¹⁰³ During the commemorative demonstration on the anniversary of Sun Yatsen’s death on March 12, 1927, which resulted in clashes with the police, known as the Kreta Ayer Incident, the GMD issued pamphlets promoting the common interests of the “weak nationals” of the Nanyang and overseas Chinese in their goal to achieve self-determination and to end the discrimination against Chinese.¹⁰⁴ The leftist GMD, which was strong in Singapore, controlling twenty-one of twenty-nine branches (the Main School),¹⁰⁵ proclaimed that its goal was “the emancipation of the [Chinese] race.”¹⁰⁶ The Comintern’s plan to infiltrate Southeast Asia through indigenization, using local agents and propaganda in native languages, was likewise central to the CCP’s expansion into the Nanyang. In July 1928, the NPC had already decided to start a “national” movement to attract Malays and Indians to the Chinese party organization. It also set a goal of unifying all nationalities and seeking the Comintern’s guidance and leadership.¹⁰⁷

The CCP’s aim of involving non-Chinese in its organization is reflected in the writings of Li Lisan, who by 1928 was the head of the Guangdong Provincial Committee and the de facto CCP leader. He had experience working in France among Chinese laborers, and his charismatic leadership and ability to adapt to different local cultural contexts had resulted in the CCP’s first successful labor mobilization in 1922 in the Anyuan coal mines.¹⁰⁸ Li Lisan criticized the Nanyang communists in his January 1, 1929, diary entry for “making a Chinese Revolution.” This “Chinese Revolution” referred specifically to anti-Japanese propaganda and boycotts, to the campaign for democratic freedoms and improved labor conditions, and to protests against British attempts to control Chinese education in Malaya.¹⁰⁹

Li Lisan promoted the establishment of a CCP organization independent of the GMD. Criticizing the GMD policy of promoting “patriotism” in Chinese communities, Li instead advocated a Nanyang Revolution that would mark the beginning of a “national” movement:

The Party’s Nanyang branch has been established for three years; the number of comrades has increased greatly. However, there has been a fundamentally erroneous idea from the beginning, i.e., to “make a Chinese Revolution” in the Nanyang. Although, certainly, to make a “Chinese Revolution” in the Nanyang is a joke, it has deep historical roots. Was not the Nanyang the “cradle” of the Guomindang? This is because the Chinese in the Nanyang were brutally oppressed by imperialism; for this reason they thought, “This is because China is too weak, and cannot protect Chinese immigrants.” That is why Chinese in the Nanyang have a very strong patriotic mentality [aiguo guannian]. This patriotic mentality is the source of making a Chinese Revolution in the Nanyang. Now our party must completely rectify this mentality; it must promote the following idea among the broad masses: “In order to achieve the liberation of the Chinese people in the Nanyang, the Nanyang Revolution must succeed, and for this reason we must go back to making the Nanyang revolutionary movement.” This will put the Nanyang Revolution on the right track and will be the correct starting point for the Nanyang party line.¹¹⁰

The same words were included in a draft resolution of the Central Committee (CC) of the CCP to the Nanyang Provisional Committee entitled “the revolutionary movements and policies of our party in the Nanyang.” The directive set the goals of the Nanyang Revolution as national independence from the British and Dutch governments, an alliance of “Nanyang nationalities,” and a Nanyang republic. The central point of the directive was that a Nanyang communist party consisting exclusively of Chinese promoting a Chinese Revolution indicated a need to adapt the communist strategy to the local context, as policies developed in the labor and anti-imperialist movements in China were applied in the Nanyang without consideration of local conditions. Those conditions included the Nanyang’s colonial status, the “many nationalities” living there, and its more developed industry.¹¹¹ Although the idea that the Nanyang Revolution depended on the success of the revolution in China was also criticized, Li Lisan’s directive still tasked the Chinese with emancipation of the Nanyang and emphasized that Chinese and locals could not achieve colonial liberation separately. Written in English, this letter makes his opinion clear:

We should further impress these slogans and conception deeply upon the minds of the Chinese to remove their wrong ideas as to look down on other nations [i.e., ethnic groups] and then the real unity can be obtained … But it is known that Chinese there did oppress Malay people, because the latter are poor and backward in civilisation. So it is the fundamental task of our party to tighten the relationship of all the oppressed nations and to make the Malay people understand that in order to release them from the yoke of the imperialists, the unity of the oppressed is absolutely necessary. If the Chinese want to claim for emancipation, it is possible only when all the oppressed nations are released. It is absolutely impossible to release any single nation separately … Thus, the principal task of our party is first of all to make all the oppressed unite and strive for the goal of national emancipation.¹¹²

The directive echoes two central points that were discussed at the Comintern congress in Moscow. Specifically, these were the Chinese Revolution as a frame of reference and the need for each party’s policy to be based on local conditions,¹¹³ that is, the policy of indigenization of the communist movement. These points were also echoed in statements by leaders of other communist parties, such as the Taiwanese Communist Party and the Philippine Communist Party, in 1928–1930.¹¹⁴

Li Lisan’s suggestions reflected what was happening in the Comintern. In 1928, he participated in the Sixth Congress of the CCP (June 18 to July 11) and in the Sixth Congress of the Comintern (July 17 to September 1) in Moscow. The CCP’s Sixth Congress elected a new leadership aligned closely with the Comintern, announced the goal of organizing soviets, and supported guerrilla warfare.¹¹⁵ According to two sources, the reorganization of the Nanyang communist organization in 1928 into the NPC took place at the Sixth Congress of the CCP.¹¹⁶ However, the Nanyang communists’ views on the Nanyang Revolution were independent of the Comintern’s. Moreover, Li Lisan (and others) referred to this letter to the Nanyang communists as a draft for discussion only, as they considered the problems of the Nanyang “complicated.” Although they also submitted this draft directive to the Comintern for approval, Li Lisan asserted that even prior to that, the Nanyang communists were to follow the draft resolution.¹¹⁷ In doing so, the CCP was making a gesture toward the Comintern and also redirecting responsibility to the Comintern.

According to available documentary evidence, it was the CCP that first suggested the organization of a Nanyang party under Comintern leadership: “The party in the Nanyang should make preparations to establish an independent party of the Nanyang, directly instructed by the Third International.” Moreover, it stated, “suggestions should be submitted to the Third International to call their attention to the work of the Nanyang because it would occupy a very important position during the looming World War, and to ask them to convene a meeting of the parties of various nations to discuss the work of the Nanyang.”¹¹⁸ (In the Comintern’s analysis, the coming war would resolve contradictions among the imperialist powers that persisted after the First World War.) The CC thus redirected the Nanyang communists to the Comintern and Profintern to obtain the resources necessary to implement these suggestions.¹¹⁹

An ECCI letter written in October 1930, after the MCP had been formally established, confirms the local initiative for the establishment of the MCP and calls the newly established party “nothing more than a Singapore organization of the CCP that recently decided to separate into an independent communist party of the Malay states.” The ECCI letter continued: “It is a very serious step forward, as it is absolutely clear that it is necessary to establish an independent communist party of the Malay states which will include the proletariat of all nationalities who inhabit them and which will be capable of organizing and leading a united struggle of the toiling masses of Malaya.”¹²⁰ However, in its letter to the British communist party, the MCP emphasized that the Nanyang communists followed the “advice of the ‘Bureau’ in reorganizing themselves into an independent communist party of Malaya,” apparently stressing its international credentials.¹²¹

However, far from expressing an intention to undermine the CCP’s position in Southeast Asia,¹²² in 1928 the Comintern also considered establishing a CCP overseas center “near China (Singapore, Manila, etc.),” where Central Committee members could carry out their work unrecognized, unlike the situation in Shanghai, where they were known to the now hostile GMD.¹²³ After the establishment of the MCP, the Comintern echoed Li Lisan in criticizing the MCP for “mechanistically grafting the methods and slogans of the Chinese movement in Malaya.”¹²⁴ The Comintern’s recommendations and Li Lisan’s directive to stop focusing on the Chinese Revolution both aimed to promote the indigenization of the revolution, that is, a united front with the non-Chinese.¹²⁵

Similar to the migrant structure of the communist movement and of society at large, the MCP’s vision of a multiethnic party organization was likely influenced by the American communist movement. Li Lisan suggested that the Pan-Pacific Trade Union Secretariat could help the MCP “in building a stable foundation” for the trade union movement in the Nanyang, which should first be organized among separate ethnic groups and then be united into one trade union.¹²⁶ The head of the Pan-Pacific Trade Union Secretariat (est. 1927 in Hankou) was American communist Earl Browder, whose organizational ideas originated in the American multiethnic context. Moreover, the Comintern promoted the same policy of indigenization in Malaya as in the United States, where Americanization was a response to pressures by American communists, as immigrant sections in the CPUSA were the largest.¹²⁷ Much as Li Lisan had appealed to the Nanyang communists, the Chinese Comintern cadre from Moscow reminded Chinese communists in the United States that they had to pay attention to local conditions in those countries where they established chapters of the AAAIL, but at the same time they should not forget to conduct revolutionary work among Chinese migrants in the United States.¹²⁸ In the Chinese communist networks enhanced by the Comintern, policies were generally built on locally based approaches and applied elsewhere as well.

This was possible with the globally mobile Chinese communists. The translator of Li Lisan’s letter, lacking knowledge of the South Seas, mistranslated “Zhaowa” (Java) as “Cuba” and “Senmeilan” (Sembilan) as “Ceylon.” One of few translators available since Tan Malaka’s desperate search for one in 1924,¹²⁹ the translator was likely Stanford student Shi Huang, who was dispatched to Cuba and Canada in 1929 by the Chinese faction of the CPUSA to build an Oriental branch of the American Anti-Imperialist League on the Pacific coast among local communists. After visiting Cuba, Shi went to Moscow to study and he returned to China in 1930 to work as a translator for the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, though he perished in a GMD jail in 1934.¹³⁰

By 1930, while the two trends of the interwar global moment, internationalism and indigenization, were manifested in the transnational organization of the Chinese Revolution, the importance of the Chinese Revolution as a harbinger of global changes perceived as the world revolution originally advocated by the Comintern, had become integral to the platforms of both the CCP and the GMD. In the words of Hu Hanmin, “Our Chinese nation is truly so large that our national revolution must obtain international assistance and establish international contacts. Of course, the responsibilities that we, the Chinese people, ought to bear will be heavy ones indeed. To the smaller and weaker nations we should offer support in order to strengthen the forces of revolution and secure the foundation for revolution.”¹³¹ Li Lisan considered China to be the site of the most acute conflicts of interest (protivorechie) among the imperialist powers, where the prospect of a communist revolution seemed most likely. Li Lisan therefore argued, “[i]ncreasing international propaganda for the Chinese Revolution among the international proletariat and regarding the defense of the Chinese Revolution as the most serious task of the Chinese Communist Party.”¹³² Li Lisan continued Hu Hanmin’s earlier attempts to use the Comintern for the benefit of the Chinese Revolution and to promote Chinese nationalism. On April 17, 1930, one week before the MCP’s founding, he suggested establishing a new, more efficient Far Eastern Bureau (FEB) of the Comintern, which had been reestablished in late 1928 in Shanghai. In communications with the Eastern secretariat of the Comintern in Moscow, he specifically demanded that organizational activities among foreign sailors, while carried out by “foreign comrades from England, France, Japan, India, [and] Indochina,” should remain under CCP leadership.¹³³ Despite Li Lisan’s exile to Moscow for his devastating policy of doomed uprisings, which nearly destroyed the CCP, he was involved in a number of important Comintern projects, working in the mid-1930s in the Xinjiang border region.¹³⁴ Li Lisan also took part in drafting policies for the MCP.

Conclusion

The proximity of British Malaya to the Dutch East Indies, a place of great interest to the Comintern as well as the homeland of one of the visionaries of early communism in Indonesia, Tan Malaka, on the one hand, and a historically large Chinese community in British Malaya, on the other, shaped the birth of communism in the British colony.

Globalizing forces brought about a new political imagination and new forms of activism in Asia. Pan-Asianism, anticolonialism, and indigenous nationalist projects shaped the two Chinese political parties overseas, the GMD and the CCP. Traditional Chinese universalist ideas and organizational patterns of Chinese migration, as well as discrimination against Chinese migrants, resonated with the interwar internationalist moment and with Sun Yatsen’s idea of allying with the oppressed for the sake of China’s revival. As we see in Chapter 6, Sun’s ideas permeated school curricula both in China and in overseas communities and thus channeled the Chinese migrant revolutionaries’ struggle for equal rights where they intended to settle in their search for employment and livelihood. The Comintern’s goal of liberating the colonies offered an internationalist legitimization for those revolutionaries. Chinese communists argued that in the Philippines, in Cuba, and around the world, Chinese communists could help the revolutions of local residents (juliudi de minzu geming) along with the revolution in China¹³⁵ and that a world revolution and national liberation of the colonies would be beneficial for China’s national interests and for the “soviet” (suweiai) revolution.¹³⁶

Chinese communists borrowed existing imperial imaginations and institutions to develop their own networks and to improve the livelihood of their compatriots and revive China as well as to build a better world of justice and equality. The result was hybrid organizations of anti-imperialist leagues based on the American imagination of the Monroe Doctrine and on the global Comintern vision. They took responsibility for the movement in the Americas based on huaqiao organizations, as it was in the Nanyang, where its policy matched China’s patterns of historical patronage in Southeast Asia, as discussed in Chapter 5. In this global quest for China’s revival, Chinese migrants found partners among those whom Sun Yatsen described as the “oppressed nations.” Among Germans, discriminated Chinese workers in the United States, native workers in the American colonies, and native Filipinos and Malays, who were oppressed by their colonizers, the label of being an “oppressed nation” reflected their subjugated status vis-à-vis the winners at Versailles.

In these overlapping networks of Chinese migrants and the Comintern, organizational modes circulated across the globe. The internationalization of the idea of the Chinese Revolution and the indigenization of two Chinese overseas organizations, the CCP and the GMD, manifested a feature of interwar global connectedness in conjunction with a continuous need for Chinese organizations to localize. Worldwide economic nationalism as a reaction to the Great Depression led scholars to proclaim “the end of globalization,”¹³⁷ yet, as we see in what follows, a new localized chapter of a global organization had been established by 1930 in the Nanyang. The era was one of those “global moments” that, in the context of “developing a global consciousness in diverse social contexts,” contributed to the integration and overlap of distinct discursive communities on local, national, and regional levels.¹³⁸

The discourse of the Nanyang Revolution as an indigenized revolution and the concern with the CCP directive being inappropriate for local conditions demonstrated a conjuncture of the Comintern’s indigenization and the indigenization of the Chinese organizations, the GMD and the CCP.¹³⁹ These cast a fresh light on the ways in which both MCP nationalism and the Comintern’s ideas about indigenization were used for mobilization purposes. Moreover, these indigenization trends coincided with the quest for local identity and subculture among huaqiao intellectuals in British Malaya.

3 The Nanyang Revolution and the Malayan Nation, 1929–1930 Nations, Migrants, Words

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.