Up to this point the book has followed the development of the Donggu Revolutionary Base Area on the one hand and Mao’s efforts to build a party-army on the other. In Chapter Four these two strands of the story come together violently. Mao is determined to purge the southwest Jiangxi party organizations of all landlords and rich peasants. Soon an “AB (anti-Bolshevik) Corps” is “discovered,” even though it is nonexistent. Hundreds of people (Communist Party members) are tortured and killed. The culmination of this campaign is the Futian Rebellion.

The Conclusion reviews the arguments made in the previous chapters and argues the importance of the Donggu Revolutionary Base Area for understanding the Chinese revolution. It is impossible to ignore the conflicts between the local interests of the Donggu revolutionaries and Mao’s efforts to create a national revolution. It is also impossible to ignore the conflict between the Communist movement’s need for soldiers and money and the unwillingness of local society to provide either in sufficient quantity.

During the interwar period, Chinese networks in the Nanyang developed within the trajectories of Chinese mass labor migration, which had begun in the mid-nineteenth century, as well as that of Chinese nationalism. Organizational forms circulated within international Chinese revolutionary anti-imperialist networks in Europe, the United States, and Southeast Asia. The indigenizing efforts of the Chinese Nationalist Party, the Guomindang, and the Comintern’s making of a world revolution overlapped in Southeast Asia. The early days of Chinese communist organizations in Malaya were shaped by ideas of Asianism as well as by the indigenization and internationalism of the Guomindang, expressed in the idea of a regional International of Nationalities. The indigenization and internationalization trends of the two Chinese parties, the GMD and the CCP, were shaped by the interwar global moment and contributed to the establishment of an independent Malayan communist organization. The MCP leaders promoted organization by three ethnic parties, Chinese, Malay, and Indian, which was not only logical for the Malayan multiethnic environment but was also built on the American communist experience.

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.