chapter 6 United Chinese Identity among Divided Homeland Ties

Because 80 percent to 90 percent of the Chinese in Hong Kong were Cantonese sojourners, they did not organize any fundraising movement and did not dispatch any representative to attend. More than a year after the outbreak of the [Sino-Japanese] war, only a small portion of Fujian sojourners sent two representatives. —Tan Kah Kee1 ∵ The Chinese bourgeoisie in Singapore were crucial to the circulation of Hong Kong industrial goods in the South Seas (chapter 5). But in the transnational mobilization of Chinese fund-raising campaigns to support China in the anti- Japanese war, the Singapore leader Tan Kah Kee found that his success in Sin- gapore could not be reproduced in Hong Kong. On October 10, 1938, on behalf of the chairperson at the founding meeting of the Nanyang Huaqiao Chouzhan Zuguo Nanmin Shangbing Daibiao Dahui 南洋華僑籌賑祖國難民傷兵代表 大會 [Campaign of South Seas Chinese for the Motherland’s Refugees and Sol- diers; alias Nan Qiao Zong Hui in Chinese [NQZH]), Tan realized that among the 160 delegates from the South Seas, only two came from Hong Kong. Tan attributed the low enrollment of Hong Kong Chinese to their different speech- group background: the majority of the Chinese in Hong Kong were Cantonese, while Tan and most other leaders in the NQZH were Hokkien. In the 1930s, the Chinese overseas reactions to Japan reinforced the cleav- ages along speech-group lines. These speech-group networks facilitated the

1 Translated from Chen Jiagen [Tan Kah Kee], Nanqiao huiyilu 南僑回憶錄 [Memoir of an overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia] (Changsha: Hunan Yuelu shushe, 1998), 70. It is worth mentioning that “Fujian sojourners” as translated here was based on the Chinese term “Min qiao 閩僑” [sojourners from Min]. “Min 閩” can be understood either as an all-inclusive term for all dialect groups from the Fujian province in general—including the Hokkien, Hokchia, Hokchiu, and Hakka—or as an exclusive term for the Hokkien only. What follows shows that the Hakka people were also active in the native-place associations for Min qiao, therefore, I used “Fujian” rather than “Hokkien” here.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���4 | doi ��.��63/9789004281097_008 United Chinese Identity among Divided Homeland Ties 251 mobilization of Chinese nationalism on a transnational scale, but at the same time, the social divides related to the diverse interests among each network continued in transnational nationalism. Unlike the existing studies that con- sider the continuing dominance of Chinese speech-group ties in nationalist movements as the “the transcendence of ‘localisms’” into “the imagining of national community,”2 this chapter analyzes the macro-political-economic con- texts that structured the tension among the southern Chinese speech-groups in migrant communities. Against the backdrop of the constant competition among national and regional actors over the definition of Chinese economic nationalism, different native-place and speech-group ties would develop dif- ferent strategies in nationalism. These strategies, albeit contradictory with each other at times, adopted the same rhetoric of Chinese nationalism.

The Homeland Politics of Chinese Overseas in the Nanjing Decade

Divided Chinese politics in Fujian and Guangdong in the early 1930s shaped the divergent political dispositions among speech-group interests. After spring 1931, when Chiang Kai-shek arrested Hu Hanmin, Wang Jingwei allied with generals in Guangdong and Guangxi—Chen Jitang in Guangdong and Li Zon- gren as well as Bai Chongxi 白崇禧 in Guangxi. In May 1931, the Guangdong- Guangxi leaders formed a separate Chinese nationalist government in Canton to undermine the legitimacy of Chiang’s Nanjing government. In Guangdong, with the departure of Chen Mingshu (chapter 3), Chen Jitang became the “King of the Southern Heaven.”3 Chen Jitang further justified his anti-Chiang campaign using Dr. Sun Yat-sen’s doctrines:

The revolutionary movement is through mobilizing democratic politics to overthrow dictatorship. This is entirely consistent with what we have done in the anti-Manchu and anti-Yuan [Shikai] movements . . . Furthermore, China has not yet been unified. Assuming that if we are now unified, would the unified China become all under the heaven of the Chiangs? Wasn’t the Manchu’s Qing unified? Wasn’t Yuan Shikai’s China unified? If the only reason for not challenging Chiang’s dictatorship is to pre- serve China’s unification, then all the previous revolutions were mean- ingless . . . The strategy of revolution, according to what Dr. Sun’s Three

2 Goodman, Native Place, City, and Nation, 313–314. 3 Li and Tang, Li Zongren huiyi lu xia, 487–491; Guangdong dang an guan, Chen Jitang yanjiu shiliao, 30–37.