The Taiwanese Communist Party (1928-1931) and Its Conceptual Engagement with “Self-Determination”: a Global Historical Perspective

Federico Brusadelli, University of Naples L'Orientale

The Taiwanese Communist Party was established in 1928, while the island was under Tokyo’s rule. Officially founded in the French Concession of Shanghai under the impulse of the Comintern (Belogurova 2012), it was formally a branch of the Japanese Communist party, although its members openly discussed Taiwanese independence, aiming to the creation of a post-colonial space for the Taiwanese “nation” (minzu), separate from both Japan and China (Hsiao and Sullivan 1983; Lu Hsiuyi 1990; Xu Kang 2020). For this reason, the organization was quickly dismantled by the colonial authorities in 1931, but its short history nonetheless offers a valuable viewpoint for the observation of the Taiwanese political discourse and the circulation, adaptation and reformulation of political models and concepts in interwar East Asia under different geopolitical influences. As part of the five-year research project SINOSELF - A History of Self-determination across the Sinosphere: Genealogies, Narratives, and the Geopolitics of a Concept, funded by the European Research Council, this paper will therefore use the lens of “global conceptual history” to analyze the Taiwanese Communist Party’s turbulent engagement with “self-determination” (zijue) and reveal the complex negotiations between local, national (either “Chinese” or “Taiwanese”), and international aspirations and identities operated by its leading members. The analysis will be based on primary sources, including the textual production of two of the Party’s main protagonists, Xie Xuehong (1901-1970) and Wang Baiyuan (1902-1965), but it will also take into consideration the (still limited) historiography including that produced in the PRC (Song Bangqian 2023), to shed light on how the different interpretations of the Party’s ideology are still relevant today to the articulation of contemporary discourses on the possibility/impossibility of the existence of Taiwanese “self-determination”.

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 Presented in Session 194. Socialist Construction, Economic Reform, and Ideological Production in China and Taiwan