By
Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers
In Kuala Lumpur, the
case of an anarchist bomb we mentioned that was planted
there on Friday morning, 23 January 1925 was not forgotten.
The police maintained a small museum in which fragments of the bomb, and a (no
doubt apocryphal) queue of hair torn off the head of a worker in the blast,
were on display.1 The principal victim, Daniel Richards, returned some months
later to a humdrum career that lasted another ten years. Across Asia, it seemed
that the long crisis sparked by the first violent assaults on the empire in the
wake of the Russo-Japanese war had been extinguished and order restored.
British residents in Malaya resumed their tropical idyll, presiding over an
economic and racial hierarchy in which, in their mind’s eye, each community
knew its place, and politics was the work of disruptive outsiders. The
government honed its formidable powers to arrest and banish ‘undesirables.’
Between 1928 and 1931, the annual number of banishments from British Malaya
averaged 1,500 and continued to rise after that.2 Wilfred Blythe, the
bobbed-haired woman’s other target, became one of the empire’s leading
authorities on the Chinese underworld; he developed a Chinese pathology as
being innately conspiratorial, governed by what he later termed a ‘secret
society complex.’3 In this way, in the imperial imagination the distinction
between the political and the criminal was dissolved, often into the shadowy
figure of the terrorist or assassin. The repertoire and vocabulary of state
violence developed in this period proved to be one of its most ubiquitous
legacies.
The myth of the
absence of politics was shared across colonial Asia. In the Indies, the Dutch
called the zaman normal, a return to ‘normal time’, or rather the pretence of it.4 Normal time revived the illusion that
colonial governments could dictate political futures. Imperial regimes never
provided an adequate answer to the question as to what precisely was on offer
for colonial subjects who still sought to work within the system and its laws.
The reality was, in most cases, far less than was offered earlier. The ideal of
an imperial citizenship had been fatally undermined by racial exclusion and by
the war. Reform plans for British India, mooted in a series of meetings between
Gandhi and the viceroy, Lord Irwin, in 1931, gestured towards constitutional reform.
But by the time they were finally implemented in 1935, they had become a tactic
of ‘holding India to the empire’ by a Conservative government.5 Colonial policy
often sought to revive royal legitimacy, as in the case of Vietnam through the
young emperor, Bao Dai, who returned in 1932. Many British in Asia still
believed the Malay sultans and Indian princes to be the people's natural
leaders. The colonialism of the 1930s was shot through with nostalgia, for an
exotic Indochine of the imagination, for the ‘real’ Malaya, for the ‘Tempo Doeloe’, the luminous ‘olden times’ of colonial Java.6 This
was a way by which European expatriates faced their racial anxieties, distanced
themselves from the violence of colonial rule and its consequences, and grieved
for a world they had themselves destroyed.7
If a façade of order
was restored, it was only because it was buttressed by the armoury
of emergency or ‘exorbitant’ powers that colonial regimes had accumulated
during the crisis years and now retained in perpetuity.8 They put a face to the
enemy, and worked ever more in concert to maintain a cordon sanitaire against
the ‘contagion’ of Bolshevism. In the months after the uprising in the
Netherlands Indies, its head of intelligence, A. E. van der Lely, steadily
embellished a narrative that it was ordered directly by Moscow, and that Tan
Malaka was its messenger. To the British in India Tan Malaka was ‘the Roy
of Javanese Communism’. They saw M. N. Roy himself, despite having what David
Petrie termed a ‘singularly barren record the most capable and ‘dangerous enemy
of capitalism, landlordism and imperialism’.9 The French remained obsessed by
the search for the enigmatic Nguyen Ai Quoc. The various colonial intelligence
services produced strikingly similar hierarchical organizational charts of
international communism. In 1928, the Malayan Bureau of Political Intelligence
identified thirteen tiers, rising from local ‘cells’ to the controlling body;
those drawn by the French and Dutch led them from the villages of Tonkin or
Java directly back to Moscow Centre. The world was redrawn in two camps fighting
a constant, secret battle for influence – insinuating, subverting, suborning –
a ‘cold’ or ‘perpetual war’ in all but name.10 By 1928, it seemed to be one
that the imperial powers were winning. The spaces in between sanctuary places
exploited by global revolutionaries were ever fewer and more constricted.
After the failure of
the 1926–7 uprisings in Java and Sumatra, Tan Malaka made his way to Bangkok,
where from its relative neutrality he tried to rally the underground around a
new Partai Republik Indonesia (PARI). It distanced
itself from both the Comintern and the defeated PKI: its watchwords were
‘self-help’ and ‘pan-Malayan’ solidarity. But the British and Dutch were
rounding up his associates on both sides of the Straits of Malacca. In early
August 1927, seeking a place of greater safety, Tan Malaka returned to the
Philippines as ‘Hasan Gozali’. The British and Dutch
governments lobbied the US authorities in Manila for his apprehension and
extradition.11 On the evening of 12 August 1927, as Tan Malaka strolled on the
Jones Bridge, after leaving the office of the newspaper El Debate, he was arrested
and immediately placed under interrogation. But he was experienced in the
shadow-boxing of such encounters; he realized that the Manila police had no
evidence of his activities in Singapore and Siam and assumed he had been in the
Philippines throughout the previous two years. He therefore pleaded that he was
merely an indigent journalist – when his pockets were turned out he had only
ten Singapore dollars and two pesos to his name – and claimed refugee status.
He gave a reasonably accurate account of his life story, but denied any
involvement with international communism or with politics in the Philippines.12
Meanwhile, leading public figures, including the president of Manila
University, who had given him food and shelter, mobilized in his defence. The president of the Senate, Manuel L. Quezon, the
man who had led the failed independence mission to Washington DC in 1919,
insisted that ‘political refugees should find ample protection under the
American Flag’.13 When the police, elated by their success in apprehending Tan
Malaka, revealed that they were acting on information from the Dutch
government, this backfired, provoking expressions of fury at the evidence of
imperial collusion. Tan Malaka had committed no crime in the Philippines and
was arrested without a warrant. To the nationalist press:
Tan Malaka might be a
Filipino patriot, of the generation of José Rizal, come to life. Today, his
sufferings were the sufferings that our leaders of the movements of ’96 and ’98
endured in alien lands. We thus understand him, the processes of his thoughts,
and the ideals that give him strength through all his misadventures.14
Tan Malaka revealed
that, in Rizal's manner, he was writing a novel to expose the sufferings of
colonial rule. However, siding with the colonial government, the New York Times
rejected the comparison: Rizal ‘never sailed under false colors, fought in the
open and not a single soul can accuse him of deceit or duplicity’.15
All this only served
to burnish Tan Malaka’s aura as the ghostly, all-powerful ‘red Javanese’.16 The
arrest presented him with his first public platform since his time in the
Netherlands. Asked at a customs bureau hearing if he was a Bolshevik, he replied:
‘Theoretically yes, but the aim must be subject to the limitations existing in
each country.’17 Elaborating this ambiguity, he later announced: ‘I am not a
Bolshevik. If love for one’s country shows tendency towards Bolshevism, then
call me a Bolshevik.’18 Produced in court after an application for a writ of
habeas corpus, Tan Malaka, ‘very serene’, ‘wearing a white suit, with a pair of
tan shoes and pink socks’, achieved immediate celebrity. His diminutive figure
was instantly recognizable in press photographs, sandwiched between police
officers in court, or, after his release on bail, about town in the company of
Filipino leaders. In flesh and blood he seemed a wholly benign figure.
Political cartoons mocked official caricatures of him as a desperado. A conference
was planned at which Tan Malaka promised to give a full account of himself. He
was swiftly rearrested on a lesser charge of illegal entry, and, after a
late-night meeting with Tan Malaka’s lawyer on 22 August, the American acting
governor of the Philippines ordered his expulsion, thus avoiding the farce of a
trial in open court. The next morning, Tan Malaka left Manila on a
Filipino-owned ship, the Susana, to Xiamen's treaty port in Fujian province,
China. Unlike his departure in exile from Java to the Netherlands in 1922, he
was allowed to make a speech from the gangway: he denounced the ‘hidden forces’
working against him and declared that ‘the cause of 60,000,000 Javanese is the
cause of 12,000,000 Filipinos’.19 Although he had avoided extradition to the
Netherlands Indies, it was well known that the police of the small
international concession at Xiamen were ready to intercept him. But the trap
was sprung too soon and, at Xiamen, with the connivance of the ship’s captain,
Tan Malaka evaded the police search, slipped over the side into a Chinese
inspection boat and went into hiding, saved once again by the international
solidarities of the waterfront.20
Some months later,
Tan Malaka wrote to Manuel Quezon from the ‘Chinese Interior’. The letter was
delivered by hand by a Chinese businessman of the Philippines, who had
facilitated his escape and lodged him under the protection of a powerful local
figure just north of Xiamen.21 In the letter, Tan Malaka reviewed the past and
future struggle of the ‘Malayan peoples’, among which he placed those of the
Philippines. Colonial rule had left them divided and defeated, but in the six
years since his return from Europe he had observed how the Malay language had
drawn the diverse communities of the archipelago together as ‘Malaysia as one
body’. Although the revolts in Indonesia had ended in failure, people in
Sumatra had acted in solidarity with those of Java, and Christians had shown
sympathy with Muslims. Because of their geographical position and mineral
resources, Indonesia and Malaya were destined to play a similar paramount role
in Asia as had Britain in the industrializing west, but, unlike the British
modus operandi, the goal of ‘pan-Malayanism’ would be
attained without war or conquest. Even under current conditions there were
steps towards the ‘federalist idea which can be put into practice’. Quezon, Tan
Malaka respectfully acknowledged, had pursued independence by ‘pure diplomatic
means’, but what if his people were ‘forced to the “next” available weapon’?
‘You are now reaching a crossroad Mr Quezon: on the
right hand a peaceful and level way, with a colourless
end, however on the left hand a mountain upward, which lead[s] to victory,
prosperity and glory of the Malayan peoples.’22 It took nearly a year for the
letter to reach Quezon and for him to reply. “I sympathise
cordially with your national aspirations, since your cause and mine are the
same,’ he wrote, ‘… I am sorry to say, however, that I can do absolutely
nothing for you.’23 There was no certainty that Tan Malaka received the letter.
His messengers were scattered across maritime Asia, hounded ever more closely
by the police. A handful of disciples made their way secretly to Xiamen to be
tutored by him. But their ability to influence events in Indonesia was
limited.24
As the revolutionary
flotsam and jetsam from Canton, Shantou, Java and Sumatra dispersed, they
slowly began to resurface in colonial territories that had largely stood aloof
from events of 1926 and 1927. In Hong Kong there was an influx of some 200
political refugees from the collapse of the Canton commune, dodging police
inspections at entry points and raids on hideouts. An underground railroad,
organized hastily in a mood of rancour and
recrimination, fed and clothe them and helped them escape onwards or find
employment. For a time Hong Kong was the headquarters of the Communist Party in
Guangdong, although, due to constant police harassment, offset only by bribery,
this contributed little to building the movement within the colony itself.25
However, in Singapore and Malaya fugitives were able to inject experienced
leadership into the local movement. They worked to repeat the united-front
strategy that had failed in China through a Nanyang, or South Seas, General Labour Union – organized across different trades – and a
Youth League.26 They put about aggressive propaganda advocating ‘Red terror’ to
combat the Kuomintang and the British police's' White terror'. In February
1928, leading members of the new Kuomintang government, including its chief
diplomatist, C. C. Wu, together with Sun Ke and Hu Hanmin,
passed through Singapore on their way to Europe. As they were feted at the
Chinese Chamber of Commerce on Hill Street a gunman opened fire at C. C. Wu,
hitting the noted Straits Chinese reformer Lim Boon Keng. The man responsible
was a veteran of the Canton commune who had broken out of jail there and taken
flight to Singapore.27 The police drew a direct connection between him and the
group behind Wong Sang’s bomb in Kuala Lumpur three years earlier. There were
also still a large number of Indonesian communists floating around the
British-controlled side of the Straits of Malacca, lying low as teachers and
traders, or housed in seamen’s lodges. The Singapore Special Branch was alarmed
when these strands began to connect as Malay-speaking Chinese started to mingle
with internationalist-minded Malays. From Shanghai, inspired by the radical
line brought back from Moscow by Li Lisan in 1930, the Chinese party began to
see that the strength of the Nanyang movement lay in building bridges with
other national struggles, in the expectation of leading them.28
Soon the Comintern
sent out new emissaries. In November 1927, Ly Thuy, reassuming his identity as
Nguyen Ai Quoc, was in Paris, perhaps not fully aware of the degree to which
the Sûreté were following his movements.
Anti-communist hysteria had taken hold in France itself, and Quoc shied away
from old comrades. He passed through Brussels and Berlin, destitute and
directionless. Then, in late April 1928, Quoc was given Comintern funds to
return to Asia, and the following month travelled though Switzerland to take
ship from Italy. He returned to the oldest settlements of the Vietnamese
village abroad in Siam. From here there were well-trodden pathways through
Bangkok to Hong Kong. Although the object of his mission was vague, Quoc
brandished his Comintern status and began to gather together those who had
graduated from his Revolutionary Youth League training in Canton, now scattered
across Vietnam, Siam and China. Quoc’s approach was, as it had ever been,
cautious. His presence and his credentials did not go unchallenged. Many
Vietnamese activists who had been witness to the Canton commune and Hailufeng soviets argued for a more aggressive policy. Quoc
was seen as high-handed, and his past work dismissed for its ‘patriotic
parochialism’.29 Critics pointed to the harder line that was coming down from
Moscow and Li Lisan in Shanghai, and they set up a new organization within
Vietnam. Quoc managed to bring the various factions together in Hong Kong in a
meeting between 3 and 7 February 1930. There he finally established a
Vietnamese Communist Party and drew up a basic programme.30 But it was
pre-empted by a groundswell of strikes and demonstrations.
The disturbances
began in Cochinchina in late January 1930 and were followed by a garrison
mutiny at Yen Bai in Tonkin in February, led by a nationalist group, which was
savagely repressed. After widespread May Day protests, the revolt became
increasingly concentrated in Nguyen Ai Quoc’s home province of Nghe An and neighbouring Ha Tinh, a region known as Nghe Tinh. In the
eyes of many observers, it was a traditional peasant protest: the global
economic slump was beginning to bite, taxes had continued to rise, and the poor
sought the restoration of lands and entitlements. But it was also a decisive
break with the past, fired by the increased mobility of the young and the
arrival of highly literate communist cadres who were emboldened to set up
village-level party cells. By September, they began to seize government
offices, attack the hated alcohol monopoly's warehouses, and establish village
soviets. The French authorities deployed Foreign Legionnaires and airpower: in
one airborne attack on demonstrators at a railway station near the provincial
capital of Vinh, 174 people were killed and many more injured.31 The French
also employed older punitive measures, such as torching villages, as well as
ever-denser regimes of population registration and control of movement. In a
brief lull, in the face of the controversy the repression had provoked in
France, the soviets launched a second wave of more murderous attacks on
officials. But they had neither arms nor military training, and in the face of
immanent famine the resistance began to crumble. On one estimate that excludes
those who died of starvation or in camps, 1,200 Vietnamese perished at the
hands of the colonial government; the rebels themselves were responsible for
around 200 deaths, only one of whom was a Frenchman.32 These sudden, incendiary
events were eulogized by the party as a ‘revolutionary high tide’. Parallels
were drawn with Marx’s verdict on the Paris Commune of 1871: it was bound to
fail, yet a necessary prelude to something larger.33 But in many ways, not
least in its anarchist ethos, it was the last, broken wave of the disturbances
of 1925–27 across Asia.34
Nguyen Ai Quoc stood
at a remove from this upheaval. He regretted that the movement was dominated by
doctrinaire intellectuals who had failed to build a broader anti-imperial
front. The Comintern summoned him from Hong Kong to Shanghai, where its Far Eastern
Bureau was reasserting its authority and rebuilding its clandestine
organization.35 He was censured for his scepticism.
The Bureau renamed the Vietnamese Communist Party the Indochinese Communist
Party, to reflect the entirety of the French territories and distance it from
Quoc’s emphasis on national struggle. Quoc himself was despatched
on a brief mission down the Malay Peninsula to attend one of the series of
meetings of the Nanyang communist leaders, out of which was founded the Malayan
Communist Party in April 1930. Quoc brought the message that the Chinese
leaders of the party needed to work more closely with the Malays and
Indonesians and overcome the ethnic fragmentation that Tan Malaka had
identified in 1925.36 But the lines of communication were fragile. As early as
the following spring, the Malayan party wrote plaintively to their Vietnamese
comrades: ‘we [have] practically ceased our relationship for a year already …
How sad it is.’37
In April 1931, a new
man arrived in Singapore from Moscow. Travelling on a stolen French passport in
the name of ‘Serge Lefranc’, he checked into the best
place in town, Raffles Hotel, and, throwing around the 22,000 gold dollars he
was carrying, set up a flat in New Mansions, Oxley Rise, and an office at
Winchester House on Collyer Quay as a seller of sawmill tools and wines. ‘Lefranc’ had travelled from Vladivostok, calling first in
Shanghai and then Hong Kong, where he stayed at the Savoy Hotel. His real name,
the police soon discovered, was Joseph Ducroux. His
revolutionary pedigree stemmed from the fact that he was bilingual in French
and English, having worked for Thomas Cook in Paris and Marseilles, where he
had come to the attention of both the French and British authorities for his
support for the Rif rebels in Morocco and for his obstructed attempts to visit
India. He then went to Moscow and was employed by the Comintern in two minor
missions to China. He had worked with M. N. Roy, and his assignment to
Singapore, he later claimed, was part of a plan to chart a new passage to India
for the Comintern.38
In Hong Kong, his
first task was to meet with Nguyen Ai Quoc: ‘a man of about forty years old at
the time’, as Ducroux described him, ‘slender, very
alert, almost beardless, with a serious and concentrated face’. Ducroux was struck by his intensity and his immaculate
French, and saw in him the timeless paragon of a monkish ascetic absorbed
solely in the struggle for freedom.39 The French police surmised that the two
men had known each other in 1922–23 in France, when Ducroux
was active in the Young Communists. Ducroux then made
an oddly brief visit to Saigon and Hanoi, his first experience of a French
colony, and arrived in Singapore, via Manila, in late April 1931. His mission
lasted less than six weeks. The Singapore Special Branch had been tipped off by
the French and watched Ducroux from the moment of his
arrival. They staked out his office by renting the room opposite, suborned his
servants and intercepted all his letters, including those to Quoc in Hong Kong.
They were written in invisible ink of rice water, easily revealed by a tincture
of iodine, employing a thin pseudonym that did not fool anyone.40 Ducroux was arrested on 1 June 1931 and his trial, the
first of a European for communist subversion, was a local sensation. He was
sentenced to eighteen months in jail; he began an appeal, but it was withdrawn
and he was banished to Saigon, where the French authorities promptly rearrested
him. Ducroux denied giving information to the police
in Singapore, beyond disclosing his true identity; he was anxious to avoid
unpleasant repercussions for the owner of his stolen passport, Serge Lefranc, a poultry dealer in Seine-et-Oise.41
The Special Branch
did not need Ducroux’s confession. After his arrest
they rounded up and placed on trial some sixteen suspected communists, a number
of whom had visited him and others who shared their lodgings.42 These included
a close lieutenant of Tan Malaka. In Saigon, the Sûreté
were able to arrest in one fell swoop almost the entire central leadership of
the Indochinese Communist Party, which had relocated to the city in response to
the Nghe Tinh soviets. Most explosively of all, on 15 June 1931, Ducroux’s telegrams to Shanghai led the Municipal Police to
arrest their recipient, ‘Hilaire Noulens’, and his
wife, and raid eight PO Boxes, seven other addresses, ten apartments and two
offices. This exposed bank accounts and a cache of over 1,300 documents which
provided hitherto elusive evidence of the legendary ‘Moscow gold’. Expenditure
amounted to £9,500 a week, moving across Asia, as well as a monthly subvention
to the Chinese Communist Party of 25,000 gold dollars. Hilaire Noulens first claimed for himself and his wife Belgian
citizenship, then Swiss, under Ruegg’s name. Their true identity – Yakov
Rudnik, a Georgian, and his Russian wife, Tatyana Moiseenko – was not publicly
revealed at the time. They were sentenced to death by a Chinese court on 17
August 1932, but, in the face of a hunger strike by the Noulens
from jail cells in Nanjing and an international campaign led by the League
Against Imperialism, enlisting figures such as Albert Einstein, H. G. Wells and
Madame Sun Yat-sen, this was later commuted to life imprisonment.43 This
personal drama masked the extent to which there were other betrayals at work,
and that the real force of the backlash, including ninety-five more raids and
276 arrests, fell on the Noulens’s local associates
in Shanghai. Among those arrested was one of China’s earliest communists, Cai
Hesen, who was betrayed in Hong Kong and swiftly extradited to Canton, where he
was nailed to the wall of his cell and beaten and bayonetted to death. This provoked
no international outcry. The ‘Noulens Affair’ was,
for the British, a vindication of their anti-Bolshevik paranoia and of their
adoption of the dark arts of secret policing.44
1. Straits Times, 14
February 1928. In the late-morning bustle, a young Chinese woman named Wong
Sau Ying made her way towards the government bungalows at the lower
end of the High Street. She was alone, dressed in a white jacket, black skirt,
white shoes, and white stockings. She was carrying a small briefcase which she
placed in front of Daniel Richards and his junior, Wilfred Blythe, who were
seated at a table. ‘There is someone threatening me,’ she said in Cantonese
dialect, the patois of the town, or so it seemed to Blythe’s ears. Richards
asked what it was all about and she offered him the briefcase, saying that a
friend had told her to give it to him. As she placed it on the table, Richards
saw two ridges on the case, as if a tin had been squeezed into it. As she
appeared to fumble with the catch, Richards noticed that there did not seem to
be one on the case. She then withdrew her hands and stepped back slightly. She
turned and spoke again, but almost immediately there was a loud explosion.
2. Alun Jones,
‘Internal Security in British Malaya, 1895–1942’, PhD thesis, Yale University,
p. 129.
3. W. J. Blythe, The
Impact of Chinese Secret Societies in Malaya: A Historical Study, London,
Oxford University Press, 1969.
4. Takashi Shiraishi,
‘A New Regime of Order: The Origin of Modern Surveillance Policies in
Indonesia’, in James T. Siegel and Audrey Kahin (eds), Southeast Asia Over
Three Generations: Essays Presented to Benedict R. O’G. Anderson, Ithaca, NY,
Cornell University Press/SEAP Publications, 2003, pp. 47–74, at p. 47; Abidin Kusno, The Appearances of Memory: Mnemonic Practices of
Architecture and Urban Form in Indonesia, Durham, NC, Duke University Press,
2010, pp. 182–200.
5. Carl Bridge,
Holding India to the Empire: The British Conservative Party and the 1935
Constitution, New York, Envoy, 1986.
6. For French
colonial cultures see Kathryn Robson and Jennifer Yee, France and ‘Indochina’:
Cultural Representations, Lanham, MD, Lexington Books, 2005; Panivong Norindr, Phantasmatic
Indochina: French Colonial Ideology in Architecture, Film, and Literature,
Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 1996.
7. On this see Renato
Rosaldo’s brilliant essay, ‘Imperialist Nostalgia’, Representations, 26 (1989),
pp. 107–22.
8. A. W. Brian
Simpson, ‘Round up the Usual Suspects: The Legacy of British Colonialism and
the European Convention on Human Rights’, Loyola Law Review, 41/4 (1996), pp.
629–711; and for legacies see John Reynolds, Empire, Emergency and
International Law, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2017; and on the idea
of terrorism see the forthcoming work by Joseph McQuade.
9. Home Department,
Government of India, India and Communism, Revised up to the 1 January 1935,
Simla, Government of India Press, pp. 106, 168.
10. A point well made
by Heather Streets-Salter, ‘The Noulens Affair in East
and Southeast Asia: International Communism in the Interwar Period’, Journal of
American-East Asian Relations, 21/4 (2014), pp. 394–414.
11. Anne L. Foster,
Projections of Power: The United States and Europe in Colonial Southeast Asia,
1919–1941, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2010, pp. 35–7; for more details
of the arrest see Manila Bulletin, 15 August 1927.
12. Tan Malaka, From
Jail to Jail, trans. and ed. Helen Jarvis, Athens, Ohio University Center for
International Studies, 3 vols, 1991, vol. I, pp. 139–45.
13. Manila Bulletin,
16 August 1927.
14. The Tribune, 16
August 1927, quoted in Harry A. Poeze, Tan Malaka: Strijder Voor Indonesië’s Vrijheid: Levensloop van 1897 Tot
1945,’s-Gravenhage, Nijhoff, 1976, p. 372.
15. New York Times,
16 August 1927, quoted in Poeze, Tan Malaka, p. 383.
16. Takashi
Shiraishi, ‘Policing the Phantom Underground’, Indonesia, 63 (1997), pp. 1–46,
esp. pp. 3–9.
17. Manila Bulletin,
16 August 1927. 18. Quoted in Poeze, Tan Malaka, p.
371. 19. Ibid., pp. 372–87.
20. Tan Malaka, From
Jail to Jail, vol. I, pp. 149–59.
21. Philippines
National Library, MLQ papers, series II, box 30, reel 11, Tan Malaka to Manuel
L. Quezon, 1 May 1928.
22. Ibid., Tan Malaka
to Manuel L. Quezon, 25 April 1928.
23. Ibid., Quezon to
Tan Malaka, 1 April 1929.
24. Shiraishi,
‘Policing the Phantom Underground’.
25. Chan Lau
Kit-ching, From Nothing to Nothing: The Chinese Communist Movement and Hong
Kong, 1921–1936, London, Hurst, 1999, pp. 95–125.
26. For a ‘third
wave’ of Chinese activism see C. F. Yong, The Origins of Malayan Communism,
Singapore, South Seas Society, 1997, p. 121. See also an important new study
which appeared as this book was going to press: Anna Belogurova,
The Nanyang Revolution: The Comintern and Chinese Networks in Southeast Asia,
1890–1957, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2019, esp. pp. 32–47.
27. Yong, The Origins
of Malayan Communism, pp. 113–14.
28. Described
in-depth in Belogurova, The Nanyang Revolution, pp.
48–80.
29. Tuong Vu
emphasizes the bureaucratic nature of the tensions in Vietnam’s Communist
Revolution: The Power and Limits of Ideology, Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press, 2016, pp. 65–67, Ha Hoy Tap quotation at p. 72.
30. Sophie
Quinn-Judge, ‘Ideological Influences on the Revolutionary High Tide: The
Comintern, Class War and Peasants’, South East Asia Research, 19/4 (2011), pp.
685–710.
31. There is a large
literature on this in English. In addition to other cited articles, see William
J. Duiker, ‘The Red Soviets of Nghe-Tinh: An Early Communist Rebellion in
Vietnam’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 4/2 (1973), pp. 186–98; James C. Scott,
The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia,
New Haven, CT, and London, Yale University Press, 1976; Pierre Brocheux, ‘Moral Economy or Political Economy? The Peasants
Are Always Rational’, Journal of Asian Studies, 42/4 (1983), pp. 791–803;
Martin Bernal, ‘The Nghe-Tinh Soviet Movement 1930–1931’, Past and Present, 92
(1981), pp. 148–68.
32. Bernal, ‘The
Nghe-Tinh Soviet Movement 1930–1931’, figures at pp. 160–61.
33. Discussed by
Bruce M. Lockhart, ‘The Nghệ Tĩnh Movement in
Communist Party Historiography’, South East Asia Research, 19/4 (2011), pp.
711–35.
34. Roy Hofheinz Jr,
The Broken Wave: The Chinese Communist Peasant Movement, 1922–1928, Cambridge,
MA, Harvard University Press, 1977.
35. Patricia
Stranahan, Underground: The Shanghai Communist Party and the Politics of
Survival, 1927–1937, Lanham, MD, Rowman & Littlefield, 1998.
36. Yong, The Origins
of Malayan Communism, p. 130. There is considerable debate on the circumstances
of the party’s funding; for an assessment of the evidence see Fujio Hara, ‘The
Malayan Communist Party as Recorded in the Comintern Files’, Singapore, ISEAS
Working Paper no. 1, 2016, pp. 48–59.
37. France, Archives nationales d'outre-mer
(henceforth ANOM),Indo HCI/SPCE 369, Enclosure 1, G. Gorton to Nadaud, 2 June 1931.
38. Laurent Metzger,
‘Joseph Ducroux, a French Agent of the Comintern in
Singapore (1931–1932)’, Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic
Society, 69/1 (1996), pp. 1–20.
39. I draw here on an
excerpt of Ducroux’s unpublished memoir, headed ‘Singapour’ and dated 16 September 1970. This is from the
personal collection of Sophie Quinn-Judge and I am most grateful to her for
providing me with a copy.
40. ANOM, Indo HCI/SPCE
365, ‘Lettre écrite à encre sympathique (eau de riz) et révélée avec de la teinture
d’iode étendue d’eau, envoyée de Singapour par Ducroux dit Lefanc, à T.V. Wong,
alias Nuuyen-Ai-Quoc, à Kowloon no. 186 Tam-Kau Road, rédigée en français’. For the surveillance see ‘Alleged Communistic
Activities’, Singapore Free Press, 20 June 1931.
41. Metzger, ‘Joseph Ducroux’; Straits Times, 18 July 1931. 42. ‘European Red
Sent to Prison’, Malaya Tribune, 23 June 1931.
43. Frederick S.
Litten, ‘The Noulens Affair’, The China Quarterly,
138 (1994), pp. 492–512; Streets-Salter, ‘The Noulens
Affair in East and Southeast Asia’, pp. 394–414; ‘Death Sentence on Noulenses’, StraitsTimes, 20
August 1932.
44. For this see esp.
Streets-Salter, ‘The Noulens Affair in East and
Southeast Asia’. For the death of Cai Hesen see Liyan Liu, Red Genesis: The
Hunan First Normal School and the Creation of Chinese Communism, 1903–1921, New
York, SUNY Press, 2012, p. 208.
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