Marxist Transnationalism of the Chinese Communist Party’s Korean Cadres

• In Event: Colonial Transnationalism between Korea and China in the 1930s

Abstract

This paper investigates political and literary texts by two Korean Marxists who were key cadres of the Chinese Communist Party: Han Wikŏn and Chang Chirak. Both Han and Chang critiqued extreme-left adventurism of the CCP in the early 1930s, which deprived them of official status within the party. Despite dogmatism and ethnocentrism of the CCP, Han and Chang were devoted to Chinese revolutions, holding onto the communist belief that socialists ought to seek national liberation through international alliance. My analysis focuses on how Chang and Han differently grappled with the gap between transnational ideals of communism and nationalist realities in 1930s China and Korea.

Due to Han’s 1934 treatise, the party ousted him from 1934 to 1936. As the undesignated, Han still mobilized anti-Japanese, communist movements in Tianjin. I argue that Han unwittingly resisted the CCP’s terms of national and ideological belonging by successfully undertaking Chinese communist’s projects neither with a Chinese citizenship nor with a title of a party member. On the other hand, Chang’s political path and literary text show an ambivalent stance about the nationalism/ transnationalism binary. Especially, Chang’s Chinese-language novel Strange Arms (1930) reveals how the boundary between nationalism and transnationalism ruptures in communist contexts. This study demonstrates that Chang foregrounded his Korean nationality, which the CCP refused to acknowledge, as a homeopathic strategy to counter the party’s ethnonationalism and foster communist transnationalism.

Author

• Inhye Han, Ewha Womans University