Black Dragon Rising: The Forgotten
Revolution in Manchuria
There are
parts of the world such as Paraguay, Central African Republic and Kyrgyzstan,
that, because of their relative poverty and sheer remoteness are almost unknown
to the world, even in this day of instant global telecommunications. And there
are nations such as Brittany, Western Sahara, and Baluchistan, that, because
they have so long laboured under colonial occupation, are barely recognised as
the ethno-geographic entities they are, even in this day of an (official)
international framework of national self-determination.
The
borderlands of Far East Asia are such places, but Manchuria, the homeland of
the Manchu people, so long under the dominance of the Han Chinese, bears the
additional burden of being deliberately forgotten by mainstream historians -
because suppression of the study of its remarkable Revolution of 1929-1932
became key to the dominant statist narratives of the red fascist dictatorships
of Manchuria's neighbours, the USSR, China and North Korea.
Bookended
to its west by the high plains of Mongolia and to its east by the mountainous northern
border of North Korea, and the swamps of the Maritime Provinces of Russia, to
the north by the immense bow of the Amur (Black Dragon) River and to the south
by the South China Sea, Manchuria is a massive territory, home to around 47-million people in
the 1930s, and comprises 1,3-million square kilometres, larger than France and
Germany combined.
And yet knowledge of this vast terrain is fantastically
occluded. In popular culture, Manchuria features only as the location of the
brainwashing of a US Army major kidnapped during the Korean War and turned into
an involuntary assassin, in John Frankenheimer's 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate. In conventional histories of the region, exotic
Manchuria is merely the setting of the "Manchurian Incident," a 1931
false-flag dynamiting by a Japanese Imperial Army lieutenant of a section of
track of the Japanese-owned South Manchuria Railway, which was blamed on
Chinese militants as an excuse for Japan to invade Manchuria, the spark, in the
Far East at least, for the conflict that escalated with the Second Sino-Japanese
War of 1937 blending seamlessly into World War II.
What is entirely neglected is why Imperial Japan invaded remote and rural Manchuria in 1931 at
all, a full six years before it marshalled its full resources against its main
strategic objective, the Chinese capital of Peking and its prized industrial
heartland of Shanghai. The reason for the 1931 Japanese invasion of Manchuria
lies in two intertwined histories: that of the independence movements in Korea
and Manchuria, and that of the region's anarchist movement, both of which the
Japanese would have to crush in order not to have revolutionary Koreans in
their rear.
The accepted trajectory of the Far Eastern anarchist
movement is currently under serious revision, with internationalist works such
as my own and Lucien van der Walt's organisational and ideological history, Global Fire: 150 Fighting Years of Anarchism
and Syndicalism (AK Press, USA, in process), transnational studies such as
Benedict Anderson's history of the Philippine independence movement, Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination (Verso Books, USA, 2005),
and country-specific studies such as Dongyoun
Hwang's Korean Anarchism before 1945: a regional and transnational approach (in Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial
World, Hirsch and van der Walt, editors, Brill, The Netherlands, 2010).
Convention has it that anarchism - revolutionary,
horizontally-federated direct democracy of the working class, peasantry and
poor - and its unionist offspring, syndicalism, first entered the Far East via
Japan in about 1906 along two trajectories, one from Japanese students in
Paris, and the other from Japanese workers in San Francisco. From Japan,
conventions holds, it spread to China, in particular the port cities of Guangzhou
and Shanghai (where it became a minority tendency that briefly allied with the Guomindang nationalists in the mid-1920s
before succumbing to the communists), and thence into Korea where it led an
ephemeral existence, much of it in exile because Japan had annexed Korea in
1910.
But new studies have revealed a more complex picture -
and a far more significant movement. The earliest anarchist influences in the
region appear to have come either via Portugal into the south China port city
of Macau from at least 1900, or via Catalonia into Manila where the first
anarcho-syndicalist union was established in 1903. From these ports (and also
from Australia and New Zealand), the movement was spread by anarcho-syndicalist
seafarers into Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Shanghai and Yokohama - and further afield
into Fiji and Burma.
It was rather the Chinese movement than the Japanese that
became the "mother" movement of the region, with the first modern
Chinese trade union established in Guangzhou by anarcho-syndicalists in 1918
with 11,000 members, whereas Japan's first anarcho-syndicalist union was formed
only in 1921 - by which time the anarchists led some 40 unions in Guangzhou
alone, plus a 5,000-strong union in Changsha, and even ran the city of
Guangzhou as a federalist commune under the anarchist General Chen Jiongming
(1878-1933) as governor from 1920-1923 (by comparison, the nascent Chinese
Communist Party had only 300 members in 1922). When Japanese
anarcho-syndicalist labour consolidated in the formation of the Zenkoku Jiren federation in 1926, it represented
around 8,400 workers in printing, textiles, rubber, engineering and other
areas, and was slightly smaller than the two other labour federations, the
moderate Yūaikai with 20,000 members,
and the communist-led federation which
claimed 12,500 members. In contrast,
in 1925, anarcho-syndicalists dominated the powerful Confederation
of Labour Associations (GLH), based in Shanghai, though they split from the GLH
later that year after bitter disputes with the Bolsheviks.
But
while south China seeded the anarchist movements in Vietnam and Malaya, the
movement in Korea was seeded by Korean anarcho-syndicalists working in Japan
where they formed trade unions and "black societies" in the
mid-1920s, a binary strategy that was implanted within Japanese-occupied Korea
itself, where, despite implacable repression against such initiatives, the
Wonsan General Trade Union in the port city of that name and several black
societies survived into the post-1945 era and even helped reconstruct the
movement in its brief spring before the Korean War broke out in 1950, plunging
the peninsula into fratricidal conflict.
And
yet it was in exile in Manchuria that the Korean movement surpassed the
achievements of even the Guangzhou Commune, establishing and defending a popularly-organised
liberated zone against Japanese, nationalist and communist incursion for three
years in a remarkable libertarian socialist Revolution that remains the most
under-studied revolution of the 20th
Century. As Emilio Crisi shows in this groundbreaking new study of the
"Forgotten Revolution," this zone in Heilongjiang (Black Dragon
River) province, a triangular territory bounded by the Amur River to the east,
the Sungchangho River valley to the west and the Harbin-Hunchun road to the
south, comprised an area of some 350,000km², which Crisi notes
is about three times the size of the free zone controlled between 1918 and 1921
by the Makhnovshchina in south-eastern Ukraine. Moreover, the Koreans
and Manchurians appear to have managed to have established a far more stable free zone than the Makhnovists,
whose battle-lines veered wildly over the map during the ebb and flow of the Ukrainian
Revolution. It is crucial to note that this area is not entirely rural: the
revolutionary capital of Harbin had more than half a million residents and was
an important railway juncture and industrial city.
The Manchurian Revolution, which Crisi calls the "Commune
of east Manchuria", drew strength from various quarters. Although Outer
Manchuria became de facto Russian from the 1850s and was lost to the record in
its own name, Inner Manchuria (Manchuria proper) had experienced a brief period
of independence following the defeat of Russia by Japan in 1905 - a seminal
event that rocked the colonised world because a "yellow" power had
defeated a "white" power - which lasted until it was absorbed by
China in 1912. On Korea's annexation in 1910, hard-pressed Korean
revolutionaries looked for inspiration to both Manchurian independence and the
anarchist-influenced Mexican Revolution of that had broken out the same year
(perhaps this is reflected culturally in the sporting of magnificent Zapatista
moustaches by the likes of General Kim Jwa-Jin and Yu Rim), and probably also
to anarchist assassination plots against figures of authority in Japan (1911
and 1923) and Malaya (1925). They also drew heavily on the decentralist village
anarchism of Pyotr Kropotkin and on the anarchist anti-colonialism of Shin
Chae-Ho, both of whom were intellectually very influential in the region, as
well as on the libertarian socialist experiments in China itself, on the successful
urban experience of the Guangzhou Commune and on the half-realised rural
experience of Fukien Province in south China. But the Black River Commune was
ultimately upheld by the Korean, Manchu and Chinese peasantry whose faith in
the experiment gave it form and heart.
The initial inspiration for research into the Manchurian
Revolution is the work of former Korean Anarchist Federation militant Ha Ki-Rak
(1912-1997), whose account History of [the] Korean
Anarchist Movement
(Anarchist Publishing Committee, Korean Anarchist Federation, Taegu, Korea,
1986), drew heavily on the reminiscences
and works of survivors of the Commune such as Lee Eul Kyu (1894-1972), the
"Korean Kropotkin". Unfortunately, Ha's work is poorly structured,
meanwhile in academia, the subject of the Commune is either airbrushed out of
history or deliberately distorted by communist and nationalist historians. So
we owe Crisi a huge debt for his detective work in piecing together the core
elements of the "Forgotten Revolution" from a range of hostile
sources, both bourgeois and Stalinist.
Thanks to Crisi's work, historians of the anarchist
movement which dominated organised labour in the developing world from the 1870s
to the 1920s now have more solid ground on which to do further research. For
instance, what were relations like between the Commune and the Jewish
Autonomous Oblast across the Amur River in the USSR, given that although the
Bolsheviks suppressed the Maritime Provinces anarchists in the mid-1920s, there
were significant numbers of anarchists among the Jews? What were the actual
structures and lines of operation of, and interactions between, the Korean
Anarchist Federation (KAF), Korean Anarchist Communist Federation (KACF),
Revolutionists League and other organs such as the Korean Provisional
Government and the Korean People's Association in Manchuria (KPAM)? How did the
KPAM differ in nature in cities like Harbin, from its presence in the agrarian communes
on the river plains, or in isolated forest, mountain or swampland hamlets?
A key question relates to the impact of the Commune on
Korean anarchist praxis: whether the later wartime Korean anarchist movement
indeed perverted and abandoned its ideals when KACF leading light and Commune
veteran Yu Rim (1898-1961) entered the powerless Korean Provisional Government
in Exile in 1941, then subsequently in 1946 unified the ex-KACF, ex-KACF and
syndicalist movements under the aegis of the electoralist Independent Workers'
and Peasants' Party (IWPP) - or whether this "auto-governmentist"
majority tendency in fact aimed at recreating
the KACF's and KACF's glorious past experiences in the administration of
the Black River Commune?
The fact that a parliamentary tendency arose out of the
ex-IWPP in the 1970s including the likes of Ha Ki-Rak in the increasingly
dictatorial conditions of South Korea (the movement was destroyed in the North)
does not mean that we can read the IWPP of 1946-1961 retroactively as what I'd
call libertarian reformist. The ideological and strategic difference between a
libertarian socialist "administration of things" in which the common
people determine their destiny, as was manifested under the Black River Commune,
and a conventional statist government, by which the common people are
subordinated to an elite which extracts profit from them, is key. This question
remains the most controversial aspect of the post-war Korean anarchist movement
- but although it is beyond Crisi's scope, it demonstrates how far-reaching the
implications of his research could be.
With his crucial maps, Crisi locates the Commune in its
proper geo-strategic context, and with his text, he has illuminated the fact
that far from the Commune originating in a weird top-down imposition of
libertarian socialism under General Kim Jwa-Jin's Northern Division of the
Korean Independence Army, anarchist militants spent eight months walking the
villages and fields of the Shinmin (New Popular Society) district to hear the
peasants' views and promote their ideas of self-managed life - before the multiparty
agreement to establish the Commune.
Here is a movement that honourably fought an uninterrupted
anti-imperialist war from 1910 to 1945 (even rescuing downed Allied airmen
during WWII), that worked without any apparent prejudice alongside Chinese,
Manchurian and even Japanese workers and militants, that had very clear
strategic objectives yet was non-dogmatic enough to build a de facto
Makhnovist-like multiparty movement that liberated a huge territory and
embarked on years of pragmatic self-managed constructive work, and which
arguably maintained those ideals under the very dire circumstances of the Cold
War on the Korean peninsula in organisational form until at least the mid-1970s
as the Autonomous Village Movement which had been founded by the old KAF and
the syndicalists in 1945.
Here is a movement deserving of restoration to its
historic central role within the
Korean liberation movement, to its core place in the revolutionary canon of the
anarchist movement, and to its credit in the 20th Century revolutionary gymnastics
of Far East Asia more broadly. Crisi's text is not only of value for students
of anarchist and syndicalist movements and milieus, but of anti-imperialism, of
guerrilla warfare, of interbellum Far East Asia, and even of the emergence today
of anti-statist, decentralist socialist revolution in places such as Rojava
(Western Kurdistan). It enables us for the first time to make a start on proper
comparative analyses with those better-studied anarchist Revolutions in Ukraine
and Spain - and urges us to examine the equally obscured Guangzhou Commune with
urgency, let alone the more ephemeral anarchist attempts at decentralising
power in Mexico, Argentina, Paraguay and elsewhere.
Because of the stranglehold the current red fascist dictatorships
have on state archives and free inquiry, we don't yet have the desired level of access to Chinese and North Korean
primary documentation of the relevant period in Manchuria and its borderlands (while
the author himself has noted with concern the highly unlikely absence of women
anarchists in the narratives of his own sources). Although the definitive study
of the Manchurian Revolution has yet to be written, with this carefully
considered volume, Crisi has given us the first real tools to embark on that immense
task.
Michael
Schmidt, co-author of Black Flame: the
Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism (AK Press, USA,
2009), Cartography of Revolutionary
Anarchism (AK Press, USA, 2013), and Korean
Anarchism Armed: the Anarcho-Communist Mass Line Part 4 (forthcoming).