Japanese and Chinese Immigrant Activists
Japanese and Chinese Immigrant Activists
Organizing in American and International Communist Movements, 1919–1933
Japanese and Chinese immigrants in the United States have traditionally been characterized as hard workers who are hesitant to involve themselves in labor disputes or radical activism. How then does one explain the labor and Communist organizations in the Asian immigrant communities that existed from coast to coast between 1919 and 1933? Their organizers and members have been, until now, largely absent from the history of the American Communist movement. In Japanese and Chinese Immigrant Activists, Josephine Fowler brings us the first in-depth account of Japanese and Chinese immigrant radicalism inside the United States and across the Pacific.
Drawing on multilingual correspondence between left-wing and party members and other primary sources, such as records from branches of the Japanese Workers Association and the Chinese Nationalist Party, Fowler shows how pressures from the Comintern for various sub-groups of the party to unite as an “American” working class were met with resistance. The book also challenges longstanding stereotypes about the relationships among the Communist Party in the United States, the Comintern, and the Soviet Party.
This meticulously researched volume illuminates the workings of the Communist movement among Asians in America and abroad in the twentieth century. Fowler's contributions will provide a critical reference point to all interested in the history of Asian Americans, labor activism, and international politics for years to come.
...an impressive book based on imaginative research and original thinking. This history of early radicalism will attract deserved attention from the ranks of Asian American Studies and other ethnic studies scholars.
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.
Historical background
Study groups, the Oriental Branch, and "hands-off China" demonstrations
From the top down
"The red capital of the great bolshevik republic"
Advancing bolshevism from Moscow outward and back and forth across the Pacific
From the bottom up
From East to West and West to East
Left-wing Chinese immigrant activists
Chinese workers in America
Formation of the Oriental Branch of the ILD
