The Proposition: Sinophone Socialisms as an Overlooked Dimension of Sinophone Studies

Since the publication of Shih Shu-mei's 2007 work Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific, the term “Sinophone” has left an important mark on academic discourse, offering a theoretical fulcrum for a range of scholarly work at the cross-sections of multiple disciplines. As originally defined by Shih (Reference Shih2007, 36), the term “Sinophone” designates “Sinitic-language cultures and communities outside China as well as those ethnic communities in China where Sinitic languages are either forcefully imposed or willingly adopted. The Sinophone, like the history of other nonmetropolitan peoples who speak metropolitan and/or colonial languages, has a colonial history.” The new scholarly field of Sinophone studies has gained its critical edge from its resolutely critical attitude toward ethnic essentialisms of any kind, particularly homogenizing visions of Chinese essence that have been marshaled as a crucial component of the cultural nationalism of mainland Chinese regimes past and present. As E. K. Tan (Reference Tan2013, 7), a scholar of Nanyang Sinophone literature, put it, one of the central tasks of the burgeoning field is to “facilitate the problematization of the essentialized concept of Chineseness, and then to encourage the relocation of a broader and nonexclusionary concept of the Sinophone.”Footnote ¹

Given Sinophone theory's drive to critically question the epistemic coherence of certain core concepts of Chinese studies, it is not surprising that it generated tremendous debate among a range of scholars operating inside and outside the mainland. Of particular concern to critics was the notion that this new field of cultural analysis would demarcate a strategically essential split between Sinitic-speaking peoples living in the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the rest of the Chinese-speaking world (Lu Reference Lu2008). Such concerns led the noted scholar of modern Chinese literature David Wang to offer a different conceptualization of Sinophone studies. Wang (Reference Wang2015a, 5) insisted that the Sinophone should be thought of less through the vocabulary of anticolonial resistance to China-centrism and more as an ongoing, deeply humane conversation regarding the historical dimensions and contemporary meanings of Chinese culture. In his work The Lyrical in Epic Time, Wang (Reference Wang2015b) analyzed the aesthetic production of Chinese intellectuals inside and outside the mainland as they responded to the 1949 rupture. Such works were presented as a diasporic negotiation with the lyrical dimensions of premodern Chinese culture, with “lyricism” (抒情) presented as a critical humanist position that sought to integrate the longue durée of the Chinese past with the unyielding demands of the revolutionary present (Wang Reference Wang2015b, ix).Footnote ²

The works of Shih, Wang, and their many interlocutors thus present scholars of global Chinese culture with two markedly different paradigms for conceptualizing the Sinophone, one that is written in an anticolonial positionality that seeks to deconstruct essentialist notions of Chineseness, and the other that seeks to sustain a Chinese lyrical tradition in which humanism can anchor itself against authoritarian regimes past and present. As powerful as both the deconstructive and lyrical strains of Sinophone studies are, it is my contention that they need to be placed into conversation with an equally powerful current within twentieth-century Sinophone history, one that can allow us to to complicate and richen Sinophone theory itself: the history of socialism as a movement of subaltern liberation that was practiced across Sinitic-speaking communities throughout the twentieth century, routed through larger international currents that coursed through the Chinese mainland, the Soviet Union, Japan, Euro-America, and back again. Multiple generations of mainland Chinese struggled for socially progressive reform or revolution from the late nineteenth century onward, from He Yinzhen to Liang Qichao to Sun Yat-sen to Qu Quibai, and they were eminently Sinophone figures in their own right, whose political trajectories took them far beyond the territorial confines of the Chinese mainland and led them to interrogate the meaning of Chineseness in the modern world.

There is also the extensive history of socialist mobilization by Sinitic-speaking peoples in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, and elsewhere, many of whom looked to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for imaginative inspiration, theoretical guidance, and logistical support. For example, the Malayan Communist leader Chin Peng came from a prominent Chinese family in the Malay state of Perak, his father having migrated from Fujian Province. His decision to join the Malayan Communist Party was intimately bound up with his identification with both Chinese nationalism and Mao's socialist revolution (Stockwell Reference Stockwell2006, 280). Scholars working in the field of Sinophone Malaysian literature have noted that such foundational authors as Ng Kim Chew, Li Yongping, Zhang Guixing, and Li Zishu have grappled with memories of the Malayan Emergency and the socialist resistance movements in the Malayan peninsula and Sarawak in their works, operating in a powerfully retrospective mode (Groppe Reference Groppe2013, 233–78). Indonesian Chinese who supported the CCP sought to foster solidarity with the mainland through a variety of public rituals such as the celebration of the PRC's National Day, inspired by the notion that the mainland was a revolutionary center for the Chinese-speaking world (Zhou Reference Zhou2019, 17–18). Hong Kong has long been a site of mobilization for mainland Chinese leftist forces, going back to founding of the CCP in 1921 (Chan Lau Reference Chan Lau1999).Footnote ³ Looking outside Asia, recent work on the complex transpacific connections that existed between overseas Chinese communities in Mexico and the United States and the Nationalist and Communist regimes show how the prospect of Chinese socialism (or resistance to it) impacted the lives of millions of Sinophone subjects (Brooks Reference Brooks2015; González Reference González2017; Oyen Reference Oyen2015).Footnote ⁴

Each of these case studies deserves extended analysis, for their temporal and spatial durations are distinct, and the depth of connection to socialist currents on the Chinese mainland differ. As a whole, they suggest the complex relations that existed in the Sinitic-speaking world among different social movements and the mainland revolution at different points in time, and their study enables us, to borrow the words of Zhou Taomo (Reference Zhou2019, 10), to build “a single field of transnational vision,” combining the history of political-economic revolution in China proper with the social history of overseas Sinitic peoples (and their non-Sinitic-speaking interlocutors). While early theorists such as Shih and Wang grounded their work in the studies of film, visual, and literary culture, this essay demonstrates that Sinophone interconnection in the twentieth century also included the realms of socioeconomic critique, community organization, and direct political mobilization. As such, Sinophone socialist history calls us to anchor the field of Sinophone studies in the realms of both culture and political economy, with a focus on understanding the complex relations that have existed historically between mainland China's revolutionary movement and Sinitic-speaking, -reading, and -writing activists located around the world at different moments in time.

A Case Study: Taiwanese Sinophone Socialism in Hong Kong, 1947–49

In what follows, I bring these methodological concerns to bear on a case study of socialist activism in the Sinophone sphere: Taiwanese socialists operating in Hong Kong during a twenty-one-month period between June 1947 and February 1949. In particular, I focus on the activism and writings of Xie Xuehong (1901–70) and Yang Kehuang (1908–78), former members of the Taiwanese Communist Party (hereafter TCP, in operation in Taiwan between 1928 and 1931). In early March 1947, they led an armed insurrection against the Guomindang (GMD) regime before being defeated by two brigades of GMD troops sent from the mainland (an event most commonly referred to as the 228 Uprising).Footnote ⁵ By June 1947, Xie and Yang had fled to Hong Kong. During their time in the British colony, they helped found, edit, and publish the New Taiwan Series (新台灣叢刊, hereafter NTS), a journal through which they could articulate their analysis of the situation facing Taiwan in the post-228 era.Footnote ⁶ Five issues of the journal and a standalone monograph analyzing the 228 Incident were published in total, with publication dates ranging from mid-1947 to early 1948.

In November 1947, Xie and her colleagues also founded the Taiwan League for Democratic Self-Governance (台灣民主自治同盟, hereafter Taimeng), a political group linked with the CCP under its United Front policy. The Taimeng would become the major organizational force for Taiwanese exiles aligned with the CCP in Hong Kong. After publishing five issues of the NTS featuring a number of controversial articles regarding Taiwan's relationship to the Chinese Revolution, in July 1948, socialists in Hong Kong convened a forum that would come to be known as the Hong Kong Conference, whose participants included members of the current CCP-backed underground resistance to the Chiang Kai-shek regime as well as representatives of CCP organs from the mainland (Lin Reference Lin2016, 44–69). After days of vigorous discussion, a resolution was passed at the meeting that served as a response to some of the more ideologically disruptive articles that had appeared in the NTS and set the Taimeng's official line regarding Taiwan's place in the Chinese Revolution.

The twenty-one months in Hong Kong represented a liminal period for Taiwanese socialists when critical questions were raised and controversial debates engaged in. With the CCP victory on the mainland becoming ever more assured by early 1949, the Taiwanese socialist exiles relocated to Beijing, where the Taimeng became more thoroughly incorporated into the institutional structures of the PRC, founded in October of that year.

It was understood at the outset that the NTS was to be a major forum through which anti-GMD Taiwanese could assert discursive authority over how the 228 Uprising was interpreted (on March 29, 1947, the GMD Minister of National Defense, Bai Chongxi, broadcast a general report that blamed 228 on lingering anti-Chinese sentiments among the Japanese-educated Taiwanese population, as well as on the specter of communist organizing in Taiwan [Kerr Reference Kerr1965, 315]). As Gu Ruiyun (Reference Ruiyun (Zhou Ming)1990, 181), a youthful follower of Xie who participated in the 228 Uprising and followed her to Hong Kong, put it in his memoir, one of the major goals of publishing such work was to “announce that the leaders of ‘228’ were still alive, and to call people to carry forward the great fearless spirit of 228, continuing the struggle to realize democracy and self-governance [on the island].” Many of the articles in the journal presented 228 as one node within the larger overall Chinese revolutionary struggle, with island-wide protests being interpreted as resistance to the GMD's comprador-capitalist rule and the network of American militarism that stood behind it, a struggle that the journal pointed out was ongoing on the mainland as well (Chen Reference Xintang1947, 90–92; Zhi Reference Zhong1947, 82). The journal also enabled its contributors to provide a systemic analysis of modern Taiwanese history and society, touching on issues such as the social formation of classes on the island, land use, kinship networks, gender relations, and literary and artistic work.

The material conditions for the publication of the journal were eminently Sinophonic, combining Sinitic language communities in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia. A portion of the journal's original funding was provided by the noted Singaporean businessman and overseas Chinese community leader Tan Kah Kee 陳嘉庚, who also founded in 1946 the influential Nanyang Chinese-language newspaper Nanqiao Ribao (南僑日報), which would later publish articles praising Xie’s leadership during the 228 Uprising (Gu Reference Ruiyun (Zhou Ming)1990, 186). Other sources of funding came from Liao Wenyi and Shi Shuanghu, who would later become leaders of the Taiwan independence movement in exile in Japan (Gu Reference Ruiyun (Zhou Ming)1990, 182). The journal also sought to reach a reading audience that was both global and local: copies of each issue were sent to overseas Chinese publishing houses in South Asia and the United States, while the majority were sent back to Taiwan through a variety of open and covert means (Lin Reference Lin2016, 58).

Produced at a time when the question of what the CCP’s United Front would actually mean in practice was still being formalized, the NTS proposed a dialectical integration of two seemingly conflicting projects: Taiwanese self-determination—what the journal referred to as “Taiwanese ruling Taiwan” 台人治台 (Yifei Reference Yifei1947, 71)—with Taiwan's larger integration into the Chinese socialist revolution and the “new China” the CCP was fighting to construct. The NTS suggested that such a dialectical integration could be accomplished by building a confederated China, one in which not just Taiwan but every Chinese province would have full democratic authority over itself. In this vision, the central government would be made up of democratically elected representatives from each of the provinces, with the margins controlling the center (Nie Shao Reference Shao1948, 116).

Such a position was the exiled socialists’ solution to questions of Taiwanese self-determination that had animated their political work since the founding of the TCP in the late 1920s, yet it took on a different shape during the post-1945 period following Taiwan's transfer to Republic of China (ROC) control. During the colonial period, the TCP's political platform not only advocated Taiwanese independence from Japanese rule, but conceived of the Taiwanese as a minority ethnicity in Asia who, according to Vladimir Lenin’s doctrine of national self-determination, could be expected to gain independence through anticolonial revolutionary action (Chen Reference Fangming2009, 326–30; Lin Reference Lin2016, 60; Tseng Reference Yuming2006, 140–65). In 1947–48, Taiwan was in a drastically different political situation, with the island under the control of an authoritarian GMD regime, but with the specter of liberation in the form of a CCP takeover of Taiwan looming. The emphasis that the journal placed on dialectically integrating minoritrarian sovereignty (Taiwanese self-governance) with majoritarian revolution (participation in a confederated socialist China) was its proposed solution to the Taiwan question in light of the post–World War II change in the island's status.

Neither of the two contemporary theoretical visions of the Sinophone that we have—an anticolonial Sinophone against China-centrism or a sensitive lyricism as Chineseness in exile—are wholly adequate for understanding the positions staked out in the journal. In terms of the question of Chinese lyricism, the NTS evidenced little desire for modern Chinese culture to be tied to a lyrical premodern tradition. In terms of the question of China-centrism, the NTS contributors’ greatest departure from Shih's vision is that they identified a CCP-led China as an anticolonial force in the world, one that could bring about the class and gendered liberation of the Taiwanese island. They thus represent an earlier era of Sinophonic possibility, when the Chinese mainland and the CCP represented proletarian liberation as a lived social struggle, one that had profound implications for Sinitic peoples living outside the mainland.Footnote ⁷ This did not mean, however, that the NTS saw Taiwanese integration into the Chinese Revolution as a seamless process. Quite the contrary, the journal whiplashed between a pan-Chinese desire for Taiwan's full integration into a CCP-led China and a powerfully localist drive that insisted that the Taiwanese be left to govern themselves, without any exogenous coercion from mainland forces of any political stripe. Their vision of a socialist Chinese confederation was their solution to resolving this ricocheting political condition. The term “Sinophone”—with its highlighting of the ambiguous and often contradictory range of positions that those on the margins of China could take in relation to continental political and cultural currents—powerfully captures this tension-filled space, even as the term “socialism” recognizes the larger overall historical struggle to which the NTS and the CCP remained committed.

The tension of integration was articulated by the journal through three central questions, each of which will be analyzed in detail in this article: the supposed lack of Chinese nationalist consciousness which existed among Taiwanese on the island in 1947; how the relationship between mainlanders and Taiwanese people would be managed on the island in the wake of ethnic violence unleashed during the 228 Incident; and the existence (or not) of an ethnically distinct Taiwanese people (台灣民族).

As a final piece of contextual information, it should be noted that the publication of the NTS took place in an immediate context in which Taiwanese people occupied an ethnically ambiguous position within Hong Kong. In his memoir, Gu Ruiyun (Reference Ruiyun (Zhou Ming)1990) notes that upon their arrival in the city, Xie and Yang sought to establish a number of native-place and youth organizations through which Taiwanese could communicate and mutually support each other. In order to establish such organizations, Xie, Yang, and Gu met with a cross-section of leading Taiwanese in Hong Kong, who told them that it was not possible at the time to establish organizations that were so openly Taiwan-centered. As Gu (Reference Ruiyun (Zhou Ming)1990, 182) recalls, while all those they meet with

One should thus remember that the NTS was published at a time of considerable ethnic tension for Taiwanese people in Hong Kong, when public expressions of Taiwanese identity, even in benign civic associations, could bring the dreaded charge of wartime collaboration and ethnic treason to the fore. The context of the journal's publication, then, was defined not just by the immediate trauma of 228, but also by the ethnically complicated place that Taiwanese people occupied in the larger Sinophone world following the fall of the Japanese Empire.

The New Taiwan Series and the Anxiety of Failed Incorporation: Taiwan on the Margins of Chinese Socialism

The NTS repeatedly expressed trepidation over Taiwan's stalled incorporation into the Chinese Revolution, often accompanied by concern regarding the lack of both nationalist and socialist consciousness on the island. The journal grounded its analysis of Taiwan's contemporary condition within a larger critique of the emerging post–World War II capitalist world system, whose fulcrum was American military and economic interventionism throughout the world. The journal warned readers that Taiwan was at risk of being doubly colonized, first by the Japanese and now by a fascistic GMD regime that was itself a geopolitical puppet of an American imperialist order, a condition of multitiered domination that was designed to shear the Taiwanese of class consciousness under a combination of lingering feudal (kinship) and neocolonial (comprador-capitalist) rule. For contributors to the NTS, Taiwan stood at the nexus of two emerging social, economic, and political orders: Chinese-led socialism, on the one hand, and American-led global capitalism, on the other. Chinese socialism was a historically resonant movement precisely because it held out the prospect of creating a breach in the fabric of American-led global capitalism. As the journal put it,

Yet if the emerging CCP victory on the mainland represented an unresolvable breach for American-led global capitalism, the reconstitution of the Chiang regime in Taiwan also represented a breach in the Chinese Revolution, which would see the emergence of a bastion of capitalist interests off China's southern coast. One thus finds in the NTS repeated expressions of anxiety over the ambivalence of the Taiwanese people regarding the CCP's revolutionary movement, owing to the largely divergent paths of Taiwanese and Chinese history since 1895. As the journal put it,

Taiwanese society's “lack of a correct understanding” regarding Chinese history was seen by NTS contributors as expressing itself in both economic and cultural domains on the island. The GMD government's August 1947 decision to resume commercial relations with Japan was analyzed in detail in the journal. It was recognized that one of the main beneficiaries of this decision would be Taiwan, which would continue its colonial-era role as a core provider of raw materials to Japanese firms while also gaining access to the larger American market for future Taiwanese manufacturing exports (Zhou Reference Richeng1947a, 112). As a result, while the resumption of commercial trade with Japan was no doubt beneficial to Taiwanese capital, the article argued that it was necessary for Taiwanese merchants to reject such commercial opportunities, putting their economic self-interest aside for the good of Chinese capital as a whole. The article deplored the fact that such a nationalist spirit of self-sacrifice was currently lacking in Taiwan, ending with a warning to Taiwanese compatriots to strengthen their nationalist resolve:

It is impossible to overlook the sense of frustration within this rhetoric over the inability of not just Taiwanese capital, but Taiwanese students and, indeed, the “people” as a whole, to more thoroughly understand what is at stake in their incorporation into the reconstituted circuits of empire, refusing to place the industrial and economic needs of China ahead of those of Taiwan. The fact that the article makes a clear demarcation between the vibrancy of political activism and nationalist consciousness “within the country” versus the situation in Taiwan, and yet precisely urges Taiwan to fervently participate within said nationalist movement (“if you are not GMD sycophants but are true patriots”), speaks to the intense anxiety the journal exuded over the island's liminal status, with American neocolonialism rupturing a longed-for coherence between Taiwan's and China's postwar developmental paths.Footnote ⁸

Taiwan's supposed lack of nationalist consciousness was also reflected, according to the NTS, in gender relations within Taiwanese society. Xie Xuehong, writing under the pen name Fei Ying (婓英) in collaboration with Yang Kehuang, offered the journal's most trenchant critique on the question of gender and Taiwanese society. In an article titled “One Taiwanese Woman's Censure,” Xie highlighted the gendered violence that GMD soldiers had committed against Taiwanese women since the handover, including the imposition of forced marriages as well as direct sexual assault. Xie placed this violence within a larger historical context, pointing out that while Taiwanese women labored under the “political, economic, and foreign imperialist oppression” that all Taiwanese did, they also had to bear the accumulated wounds of what Xie called “feudal patriarchal oppression” (Fei Reference Ying1947, 52), which had always existed on the island and continued to do so in unchanged form. On the question of gender discrimination, Xie did not hesitate to make a direct link between the policies of the Japanese colonial period and those of the current GMD regime. Indeed, both governments exhibited an authoritarian drive to stop up feminist activism within the island, cutting off Taiwanese women from larger sociopolitical movements in the world. As Xie put it,

Here, once again, we see a distinct anxiety regarding the consciousness that Taiwanese people, in this case Taiwanese women, do not yet have: “very few of them had a correct understanding of global popular movements . . . they cannot accomplish the task that is required of them at this moment.” Interestingly, the article was signed as having been sent to the journal from Tainan, and it ended with the wish that “women from across the nation” would give “particular concern to the movements of us Taiwanese women, providing us often with strong leadership and solicitous assistance, ensuring that we can work shoulder to shoulder and arm in arm with the entirety of the people, and particular its sisters” (Fei Reference Ying1947, 53). This ideal vision of Taiwanese women being led benevolently by their sisters from across the Taiwan Strait was undercut by the “shameful” reality that, for Xie, very few Taiwanese women had the proper revolutionary consciousness to participate in such a movement at the current moment, and were in effect cut off from these revolutionary currents. It was Xie's anxiety over Taiwan's lack of incorporation into these larger overall currents of gendered revolutionary history that shone through.

Dialectical Thinking between Centralized Orthodoxy and Minoritarian Sovereignty

It is not the case, however, that the NTS represented only an extended critique of all that Taiwanese society lacked in terms of Chinese nationalist sentiment or socialist political commitment. Alongside this rhetoric of lack, one finds in the NTS a powerful sense of pride in Taiwan's modern historical experience of anticolonial struggle against the Japanese regime before 1945. The NTS presented a cross-section of articles that subversively gave full play to the complexity of Taiwan’s localist difference and attempted to think of Taiwan not from the revolutionary outside, but rather from the localist inside. The switch in analytical focus—Taiwan moving from exogenous object of critique to endogenous object of protective reverence—is what provides the NTS with its ideological complexity and speaks to the heated debates that took place in Hong Kong regarding the island's future during this period.

The most notable of such articles appeared in the fourth issue of the journal, published on January 1, 1948, titled “Self-Governance and Orthodoxy,” written under the pen name Nie Shao (臬紹). According to historian Lin Qionghua (Reference Lin2016, 61), the ideas found in the article were discussed collectively by the exiled Taiwanese as early as the summer of 1947. The ideas contained in “Self-Governance and Orthodoxy” were reportedly first proposed by Xie Xuehong at such meetings, and they were worked out in discussion with others. Finally, a junior member of the group, Li Zixiu (李自修), put pen to paper to give shape to the collective thread of discussion going on within the group. The article took a sharply different tone than much of what had been seen in the NTS up to that date, striking a defiantly localist note from its opening paragraphs:

The article's presentation of the 228 Uprising interprets the event less through the prism of the larger overall Chinese revolutionary struggle (as other articles in the journal emphasized), and more as an expression of the sovereign will of the Taiwanese people on their own terms. While the 228 movement failed, it held a crucial lesson for the people, one that clarified for them what genuine sovereignty was:

Here, 228 emerges as a collective experiment that not only gave the lie to both Japanese and GMD rule, but also set a path for Taiwanese liberation to come: “true self-governance” (Nie Shao Reference Shao1948, 117). While readers accustomed to the rhetoric of the NTS would, at this point, expect the article to dovetail into calls to join the Chinese Revolution as the path for overthrowing the GMD, the article surprisingly offered a deeper critique of exogenous rule than anything that had appeared in the journal before. The article claimed that the real crisis facing Taiwan was decidedly not between a CCP supported Taiwanese socialist movement and the GMD, but rather between two different modes of sociopolitical thought: one represented by the notion of self-governance (自治) and the other represented by the concept of orthodoxy (正統). Here, self-governance meant the democratic election of a government in Taiwan by the Taiwanese people themselves: “The Taiwanese people naturally want to choose a Taiwanese governor. That is to say, a Taiwan governed by the Taiwanese, and because it will be a Taiwan governed by the Taiwanese, the hegemonic position that waisheng personages (外省人士) currently hold in Taiwan must be eliminated” (Nie Shao Reference Shao1948, 118). This was the first moment in the journal that the term waisheng appeared, shifting the conversation about Taiwan away from the axis of a CCP versus GMD struggle among Chinese, and toward an axis defined in ethnic terms between those who are referred to as “Taiwanese” (here, explicitly those who had undergone the experience of Japanese colonialism) and those who came from the other side of the Taiwan Strait after 1945. For readers of the journal, the ethnic sensitivities of such a topic would not have been lost. Six months prior, rounds of ethnic violence between the two groups had marked the early days of the 228 Uprising (Lin [Reference Mushun1948] 1994, 11–13).

The article immediately recognized that its insistence that waisheng people should not form part of the government in Taiwan could be perceived as discriminatory, and yet in another surprising move, it explained the necessity of such an exclusionary position by claiming that it was the only path to workable democracy on the island:

The article went on to imagine a locally sovereign Taiwan imbedded within a confederated China, with not just Taiwan but every Chinese province having full democratic authority over itself. As the article put it,

In this federalist vision, every province would democratically elect representatives who would “form the central organs of power, that is the central government [of the country],” with the margins controlling the center. Within this schema, the “power that is located in the provinces can be organically concentrated together. This is a form of national government that comes from the bottom up, which is to say a democratic central government” (Nie Shao Reference Shao1948, 119). Interestingly, the article referenced the three self-reliance policies (三自政策) that was implemented in Guangxi in the 1930s by the New Guangxi clique as an example of previous experiments in local self-governance (an experiment that notably kept military, political, and economic power in the hands of a regional government against a distrusted ROC regime), one that could provide resources for thinking about Chinese federalism in the postwar period (Nie Shao Reference Shao1948, 119).Footnote ⁹

Yet the article claimed that this vision of a sovereign Taiwan within a federated China was opposed by those “who have no experience” of Taiwan, and who thus misread the drive for local sovereignty as “a form of self-governance that ‘does not want to be the same as China’” (Nie Shao Reference Shao1948, 119). As such, the drive for self-governance was misread as “a dangerous movement that advocates ‘independence’” (119). Here, in the article's most destabilizing move, it suggests that this exogenous blindness to the legitimacy of genuine self-governance is rooted not only in the exigencies of the civil war moment, but in a mode of thought endemic to Chinese political culture tout corps, an authoritarian strain within Chinese political philosophy that the article defined by the term “orthodoxy”:

The article went on to state that in China, this orthodox perspective was present not only in the ruling bureaucracy, but in fact among some “knowledgeable members of the domestic opposition” (Nie Shao Reference Shao1948, 120), a clear, if veiled, reference to the CCP. Indeed, the article provocatively suggested that “the orthodox perspective of China will not immediately disappear with the fall of the GMD regime” (121), but it could persist into a socialist future to come. This refusal to recognize local claims to sovereignty and identity would only exacerbate ethnic tensions between Taiwan and the mainland, becoming a vicious ideological cycle from which cross-strait relations might never recover:

The article's critique of exogenous political and cultural hegemony was echoed in other articles found in the journal, particularly those published in its third and fourth issues. For example, in the third issue, an anonymous “Letter to the Editor” (supposedly from a reader in Taiwan) provided a detailed discussion of the ethnic tensions currently roiling the island, and particularly the onerous imposition of Mandarin as a “national language,” which officials were using as a pretext for denying Taiwanese positions as teachers and civil servants (Lai Reference Yong1947, 97–98). In the fourth issue of the journal, the author Zhao Ji (Reference Ji1948, 105) recognized that the authoritarian brutality of the GMD had made the Taiwanese people look upon the mainlander government as a foreign occupying power, exacerbating ethnic tensions to an extreme degree: “This regime is looked upon as a controlling suzerain state, with its bureaucrats and those hailing from other provinces looked upon as people of a foreign nation . . . [the government's] bureaucratic greed and corruption has generated within the Taiwanese people a form of resistance grounded in a sense of Taiwanese themselves being a distinct ethnic-national group” (emphasis added). While the article held out the hope that these national divisions on the island would eventually fade, it warned that they would do so only if local self-governance was implemented.

Finally, in Yang Kehuang's famed essay “The Taiwan of Tomorrow” (written under the pen name Yifei 一斐), he asked a potent question: “When the reactionary clique falls, who comes next? Will it be the case of simply the GMD going and then the CCP coming, Chiang departs and Mao arrives? Once the reactionary GMD collapses, will it simply become the Tianxia of the CCP?” (Yifei Reference Yifei1947, 71). Yang's sardonic use of the term Tianxia, a core concept within Chinese political philosophy that projects a benevolent and civilized centralizing power across an incorporated realm, echoes the journal's diagnosis of authoritarianism as being imbedded in not just the GMD, but indeed in the progressive opposition parties on the mainland well, and that it was this Tianxia orthodoxy that was the real obstacle to productive relations across the Taiwan Strait. Yang Kehuang here recast cross-strait issues not as a question of the GMD versus the CCP, but of two different sociopolitical cultures: a Tianxia-based Sino-order that saw final authority over Taiwan as resting with mainland China and an island-based community that had already developed its own distinct identity and collective demands, foremost of which was democratic self-governance. Without a firm analysis of these two different political cultures, cross-strait issues would be forever cast into vituperative cycles of epistemic (and real) violence, a bad infinity of mainland orthodoxy versus island resistance.

As a response to such concerns, the Taimeng incorporated into its original charter a clear commitment to working toward genuine self-governance for Taiwan within a CCP-led China, inspired by a belief in the promise of Mao's United Front and his theory of New Democracy. As Yang Kehuang put it in “The Taiwan of Tomorrow,” the Chinese Revolution should be understood

Clearly, this was not a vision of Taiwan being swallowed up by any single exogenous political entity, but a hoped for dialectical integration in which Taiwan could participate in the social and economic justice that was promised by the Chinese Revolution, but it would keep sovereignty in the hands of the island's people, understood as a historical collective in their own right.

In this sense, these articles are Sinophone documents par excellence, if one remembers that one of the cardinal features of Sinophone discourse is to introduce “difference, contradiction, and contingency” into a discursive field that “envisages a list of necessary and fixed identities for ideological and political purposes” (Shih Reference Shih2007, 35). For the NTS, in the face of what the journal called an “orthodox position that claims that ‘China must rule Taiwan,’” the journal proposed a different way of thinking Taiwan-China relations: a refusal of exogenous authoritarian control, but not a rejection of larger regional integration in a Sinosphere to be socially transformed by a revolutionary project that would be both democratic (respectful of local sovereignty) and socialist (promising class and gendered liberation).

Ghosts of the Taiwanese Ethnic People amid Specters of International Receivership

When, in the fourth issue of the journal, it was asserted that within Taiwan there was a form of resistance present “grounded in a sense of Taiwanese themselves being a distinct ethnic-national group” (Zhao Reference Ji1948, 105), the journal was not presenting a new idea but reckoning with one of the central ethnographic questions facing Taiwanese socialism since its first generation of practitioners in the 1920s: were the Taiwanese people part of the larger ethnic group known as the Chinese people (中華民族), or were they a distinct ethnic nation in their own right? The question of the ethnic definition of the Taiwanese people raised ghosts of a quite recent vintage: those of the TCP, whose platform had not only advocated Taiwanese independence but conceived of the Taiwanese as a minority ethnicity in Asia who, according to Lenin's doctrine of national self-determination, could be expected to gain independence through anticolonial revolutionary action (Chen Reference Fangming2009, 326–30; Lin Reference Lin2016, 60; Tseng Reference Yuming2006, 140–65).

Such questions took on increased intensity in Hong Kong after Taiwanese exile Liao Wenyi (廖文毅) began in the summer of 1947 working to consolidate political support for the Taiwan independence (Taidu) position, which was organized around Liao's call for Taiwan to be first placed in international receivership under the auspices of the United Nations, to be followed by a general referendum on sovereignty for the island open to all of its people.Footnote ¹⁰ Regarding the NTS's position on international receivership for Taiwan, here one finds a marked discursive tension in the journal. Without a doubt, the NTS published a considerable number of articles critiquing Liao's movement (Hanzhi Reference Hanzhi1947; Qiu Reference Pingtian1948; Wu Reference Xiaomin1947). The journal declared that such a movement offered Taiwan only a “colonial form of independence,” for what “international receivership” actually entailed was the domination of the island by American forces, and under such conditions, there was absolutely no hope that a fair and democratic referendum regarding Taiwan's future would actually take place (Wu Reference Xiaomin1947, 88). Indeed, denunciations of Taidu advocates reached intensely vituperative levels in the pages of the journal, with not only accusations of ethnic-national betrayal (independence advocates were denounced as “degenerates of the nation”; see Zhou Reference Richeng1947b, 24), but even threats of violence launched against its proponents (Hanzhi Reference Hanzhi1947, 46–47).

Yet interestingly, certain articles in the journal did recognize the appeal that the notion of independence had for the Taiwanese people. Here, once again, we see the journal switch from an exogenous to an endogenous perspective, one that saw Taidu as, in some ways, an understandable (though not endorsable) position for those currently living in Taiwan. For example, in an article titled “The Way Out for Taiwan Is There,” there was a surprising expression of sympathy for the independence position, given that according to the article the GMD in Taiwan were even more authoritarian than the former Japanese colonial government. In that the article recognized an intensification of authoritarianism from Japanese to GMD rule, it ironically dovetailed with one of the major historical positions of the independence movement: that the GMD represented another colonial regime imposed upon the island from the outside. As the article put it,

Such sympathetic sentiments toward Taidu were not limited to one article in the journal, but can be found at various points in its print run. For example, in the first article that the journal published on the question of receivership, titled “Exposing the Preposterousness of Receivership” (written under the name Zhou Richang), a vigorous critique of the concept was presented:

Yet, in a fascinating discursive whiplash, the article recognized that despite China's iron-clad ethnic and political claims on Taiwan, it was also fair that the Taiwanese people be given the chance to decide their own future through a referendum. As Zhou (Reference Richeng1947b, 24–25) put it, “As for the notion that America would like to use the ‘Atlantic Charter’ in Taiwan and carry out a referendum, and in this way have the Taiwan question solved via an expression of the will of the Taiwanese people themselves, in principle we do not oppose this . . . for this is indeed the most democratic method [of deciding the island's future].” The only problem for Zhou was that he had no faith that America could ever fairly administer a democratic referendum, given the military control the American government already had over the island. The article thus demanded that before any referendum took place, the political and military apparatuses of both the GMD state and their American overlords be removed: “The Taiwanese people's own will cannot not be expressed under armed threat and amidst the terror caused by capture, imprisonment, and murder” (25). Zhou did not, however, reflect on the obvious contradiction in his position—for if China's ethnic and political claim on Taiwan was iron-clad (“it goes without saying that Taiwan is the territory of China”), why, then, was it necessary to provide the Taiwanese with a say in the matter at all, one that could lead to independence and national rupture? The recognition of an endogenous position on the matter—that those actually living on the island should have some say in their political future—struck a powerfully dissonant note within the article's otherwise iron-clad assertions of ethnic-national unity between Taiwan and the mainland. Once again, exogenous and endogenous rhetorical modes crisscrossed in complicated patterns across the pages of the journal.

On the Precarious Nature of Taiwanese Sinophone Socialism

The NTS was both clearly socialist (committed to a structural revolution in class and gender relations within the island) as well as Sinophone, if the latter term denotes a historically interconnected yet complicated and at times contradictory relationship with China. Indeed, the journal's most analytically rich moments are precisely when those notes of ambiguity shine through—where a most Sinophone sense of the need to give voice to a marginal social experience (the drive for island democracy) intrudes upon a seemingly resolute logic of centralizing unity (of either the CCP or GDP variety). While the journal attempted to dialectically think through the China/Taiwan relation by insisting that genuine liberation on the island could only be brought about through its participation in the Chinese Revolution, which at the same time would bring democratic self-governance to the island, its at times ricocheting discursive movements between Chinese and Taiwanese nationalist expressions are undeniable, making it an archive of contradictory rhetorical impulses.

Historical events in the 1950s would reveal the precarious nature of the dialectical integration proposed by the journal. Xie Xuehong and Yang Kehuang's decision to take up arms against the ROC regime in early 1947 left them condemned on the island as communist bandits for decades to come. Yet, in the most bitter irony of all, after they embarked for the mainland in early 1949, their absolute insistence on Taiwanese self-governance and the particularity of the Taiwanese as a historical collective brought them into conflict with a PRC state nationalism that by then shared with its ROC enemy an antipathy for Taiwanese independence. The CCP's lack of comfort with not only the Taidu position, but indeed Xie's insistence on Taiwanese self-governance within a larger confederated China, was witnessed as early as the Hong Kong Conference of July 1948, where an explicit rejection of both of these positions was written into the closing conference resolution. As the resolution put it,

The conference resolution also critiqued former members of the TCP for their view regarding the Taiwanese as a national ethnicity, explaining that such an error resulted from their long isolation from the revolution on the mainland. As the resolution put it, “cadres of the TCP should recognize that in the past under Japanese rule they had no communication with the CCP, and as such they are unfamiliar with the correct line that has developed from the party under Mao Zedong's leadership. They should study with humility, and should not insist on keeping their old views” (quoted in Chen Reference Fangming2009, 232). The conference resolution could be read as a veritable warning to former TCP members not to cling to an earlier era of Taiwanese socialist theory, but to embrace the current party line on all matters. Regardless of what Yang and Xie's positions were on these clearly fraught questions, given their fugitive status in Taiwan, they had little choice but to continue to put their trust in the New Democratic aspirations of the United Government.

By early 1949, the Taimeng members headed to Beijing, and Xie was given a prominent place within the new bureaucracy, serving as a delegate at the first People’s Consultative Congress, which worked to draft a constitution for the new PRC state. Yet conflict between the Taiwanese exiles and central party authorities broke out almost immediately after their relocation to the mainland. In May 1950, as part of a planned (but never implemented) military assault on Taiwan, the CCP decided that during the ensuing occupation, Su Yu, then second in command of the Eastern China Field Army, would become the provincial secretary of Taiwan, with Xie and Cai Xiaoqian serving as vice secretaries. Xie strenuously opposed this, reportedly pounding a table during a meeting with the secretary of the Eastern Command, Rao Shushi, vigorously asserting that only a democratic vote taken within the island could decide the question of who would serve as Taiwan's provincial secretary, through the democratic measures outlined in the NTS a year prior (Lin Reference Lin and Yanbin2017, 31).

Both Yang and Xie would be persecuted in the rectification campaign of 1952, critiqued for rightist deviations in their thought, which were summarized in four charges made against them: that they advocated a high-level of autonomy for Taiwan; that their leadership style was marred by paternalism; they indulged in hero individualism; and that they insisted that among the Taiwanese there were no traitors to the nation, a position of tolerance for Taiwanese collaboration with the Japanese during the colonial period (Chen Reference Fangming2009, 578). By 1954, relations had become so fraught between Yang and Xie and the party that Yang submitted to the central party leadership a document titled “Taiwan Is Another Nation” (台灣為另一民族; see Yang Reference Yang and Cuihua2005, 355). Persecution would continue during Anti-Rightist Campaign in 1957 and later during the Cultural Revolution, when both Yang and Xie were subject to physical and mental violence, which contributed to Xie’s worsening health and eventual death in 1971.

Denounced as rightists in mainland China and as leftist bandits in Taiwan, Yang and Xie died veritably stateless, without being accepted by any single political regime on either side of the Taiwan Strait. Even today, Xie is a problematic figure for the Taiwanese nationalism of the governing Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), precisely because of her close relationship to the PRC state and committed socialist values. However, the writings of Yang, Xie, and their colleagues from the period between 1947 and 1949 alerts us to a vision of Sinophone politics in which, at least for a short time, solidarity was theorized not as a binary choice between accepting a major China or a minor Sinophone, or as a question of loyalty to a lyrical “cultural China” divorced from the question of political-economic revolution. Rather, Sinophone socialist politics meant building networks of empowerment that challenged class and gender hierarchies in a present that could be transformed only if the minor and the major, Taiwan and the Chinese Revolution, were dialectically integrated.

That the CCP could not endorse a political project organized around the Taiwanese as a self-governing people, even within a larger Chinese confederation, has had lasting repercussions for political thought across the Taiwan Strait to this day. While we should not naively believe that revisiting this tumultuous time period can unlock cross-strait relations today—after seventy years of largely differing developmental pathways, it is harder than ever to imagine a union of the CCP's New Tianxia with the exacting commitment to Taiwanese independence of the DPP—at the very least, the political thought to be found in the NTS should alert us to the full complexity of the positions that Taiwanese socialists took. They speak to a complexity of perspective that both the CCP and GMD found it easier to silence than confront. As a result, the NTS's prediction of a bad infinity from which cross-strait relations would never recover from has seemingly come to pass: the circuitous deadlock of mainland orthodoxy versus island resistance seems more potent today than ever before.