:Japanese and Chinese Immigrant Activists: Organizing in American and International Communist Movements, 1919–1933

Abstract

The involvement of Chinese and Japanese immigrant activists in the communist movement in the United States during the early twentieth century has largely been neglected in the historiography of Asian America and the international communist movement. When they do mention these events, scholars tend to examine them in the context of the homelands of the immigrant activists rather than treating them as part of U.S. history. Given this historiographical vacuum, Josephine Fowler's work may be considered the earliest book-length scholarly text that supplies readers with much-needed information on the radical activities of Chinese and Japanese expatriates in the United States. Fowler uses an impressive global perspective to examine Asian immigrants' participation in the communist movement. The activities of the Chinese and Japanese leftists in the United States were often the result of multilateral and transnational relationships: relationships between the Soviet Union and East Asian countries, those between Moscow and Asian immigrant activists in America, and those between the Asian émigrés and their homelands. These transnational connections entailed frequent exchanges of personnel and ideas. Although the multilateral relationships were supposed to be mutual and reciprocal, the revolutionary initiative often came from the Soviet Union, the red capital. Based on V. I. Lenin's theory that communist revolutions could succeed in capitalist countries only when the people in the colonies rose to overthrow Western imperialism, the Communist International (Comintern) assumed the task of training communist and nationalist cadres from China, Japan, and other countries. These cadres, after receiving a Marxist-Leninist education in the Soviet Union, would return to their homelands or to the United States to lead the revolutionary movements there. Communications between the Asian immigrants in the United States and their motherlands occupy a conspicuous position in the book. Socialism among the Japanese expatriates, as Fowler tells us, actually was rooted in the labor and socialist movements in their home country at the turn of the twentieth century. Returning immigrants also carried ideas about the labor movement back to Japan. While it was for the sake of improving their livelihood at home that the Chinese migrated to North America, the urgent desire to rid China of imperialist influences was the principal impetus for Chinese activists in the United States.