European Marxism diffused widely to other parts of the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, attracting support from many thinkers whose contributions to Marxist thought about the international dimensions of political economy deserve to be better known. This chapter focuses on some innovative and important Marxist thinkers from Trinidad (C.L.R. James, George Padmore), China (Mao Zedong), India (Manabendra Nath Roy), Indonesia (Tan Malaka), Japan (Kōtoku Shūsui, Takahashi Kamekichi, Sano Manabu), and Peru (José Carlos Mariátegui). These thinkers were important not just because they became well known in their local contexts and, in some cases, in wider international Marxist networks. They also sometimes developed ideas that predated better-known European ones and they often called attention to issues that received less attention in European Marxist debates, such as racial discrimination, Eurocentrism, the relationship between Marxism and Islam, the nature and impact of imperialism outside of Europe, and revolutionary politics in places subject to imperialism.

The Sumatra-born revolutionary, Tan Malaka, shared prison time in Hong Kong with Ho Chi Minh. In this chapter we see the then twenty-six-year-old Tan Malaka setting up in revolutionary Guangzhou under Communist International auspices. There, he networked with leading Sun Yat-sen government officials, co-hosted an important Asian trade union conference, and assumed a new role as editor and publisher. Known to Ho Chi Minh from Moscow days, the two would also meet in Guangzhou. Somewhat adrift in the Philippines prior to deportation to China, it could well have been Ho Chi Minh who summoned him to Hong Kong with a view to clarifying the status of the communist movement in Singapore/Malaya in the wake of a failed rebellion on Java. Tan Malaka was treated differently from his Vietnamese counterpart. He was arrested in the British colony, denied legal assistance, did not make a court appearance or gain media attention, although he did evade extradition to his homeland. Tan Malaka bequeathed a rich description of his experience in Victoria Prison and this chapter adds fresh detail on this episode, otherwise little acknowledged in Hong Kong writing.

During the interwar period, Chinese networks in the Nanyang developed within the trajectories of Chinese mass labor migration, which had begun in the mid-nineteenth century, as well as that of Chinese nationalism. Organizational forms circulated within international Chinese revolutionary anti-imperialist networks in Europe, the United States, and Southeast Asia. The indigenizing efforts of the Chinese Nationalist Party, the Guomindang, and the Comintern’s making of a world revolution overlapped in Southeast Asia. The early days of Chinese communist organizations in Malaya were shaped by ideas of Asianism as well as by the indigenization and internationalism of the Guomindang, expressed in the idea of a regional International of Nationalities. The indigenization and internationalization trends of the two Chinese parties, the GMD and the CCP, were shaped by the interwar global moment and contributed to the establishment of an independent Malayan communist organization. The MCP leaders promoted organization by three ethnic parties, Chinese, Malay, and Indian, which was not only logical for the Malayan multiethnic environment but was also built on the American communist experience.

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.