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.

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

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.