Exile to the Equator: Chinese Anti-Colonialism and Nationalism in Southeast Asia, 1939–1946
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2022-01-01
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This paper discusses and compares the ideas of Chinese leftists in exile, as expressed in their publications and journals and in their anti-colonial activism in collaboration with the overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia from 1939 to 1946. Describing Chinese anti-colonialism and nationalism through a transnational conceptualization and an ethnographic approach, stories that occur “behind the scenes” enhance our ability to decode key words and reveal the complexities of concrete economic and political conflicts from multiple sources that involve migration, ethnicities, and capitalism. The class nature of Chinese anti-colonial internationalism that was forged during and after the Second World War was deeply embedded in the “liberal” discourses of freedom, democracy, equality, liberty, and women’s emancipation. It was also rooted in the mass politics of anti-capitalism, which was global in scope and fine-grained, local, and rooted in everyday life. The Chinese leftist geopolitical configuration of the “nations below the wind” and “the equator” enabled the perception of a proto-global South—South alliance as a world-historical force, with the dual goals of overturning unequal development and achieving an integrated path of anti-colonialism and national independence.
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Zhu, Q (2022). Exile to the Equator: Chinese Anti-Colonialism and Nationalism in Southeast Asia, 1939–1946. China and Asia: Journal in Historical Studies, 4(1). pp. 112–146. 10.1163/2589465X-04010005 Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/26623.
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Qian Zhu
I am holding a Ph.D in History from New York University. As a historian of modern China and a theorist of everyday life, my research is on the intellectual history of China in the late 19th century and 20th century. I am particularly interested in how Chinese non-Marxist leftists understood everyday life and conceptualized it in regards of human emancipation, modernization, democracy and mass politics in the early 20th century. My research projects include Chinese feminism, leftism, and new village movement in the 20th century China. Beyond my specific field of modern China, I am working through feminism and gender, cultural politics, the theory of everyday life, urban studies and labor history. My publications include women's singleness in China, histories of migration in East Asia in the first half of the 20th century, and mass education movement in the 1930s China. My book manuscript addresses intellectual conceptualization of new life and the new life movement in China and how the social movement responded to the global capitalism, leftism and the Chinese revolution seeking for anti-fascism, anti-colonialism, democracy and the nation-state building in the first half of the 20th century in China and in Southeast Asia. My second book project focuses on the new village movement and how it related to the state policy of urbanization, governance, citizenship and how it helped us to understand socialist and post-socialism urbanism in 20th century China.
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