Countering the “Communist Menace”: Transnational and Inter-imperial Responses to International Communism in 1920s Southeast Asia

In March 1925, the Dutch resident at Pekalongan (Java) wrote to the Attorney General that communist propaganda inciting violence against Dutch rule had been sent via Russian-led communist cells in the Hague to “the whole of” Java. The next month, the French Governor General of Indochina wrote that it was imperative to “redouble the vigilance” against communism in Indochina, because communist agents were simultaneously corrupting Vietnamese living in Paris and intervening directly in Indochina via Canton. In November, the British consul in Batavia wrote the Foreign Office in London, warning that Moscow had active interests in British Malaya that had spread like a “virus” from the already “infected” Java. Indeed, by 1925 anti-colonial activists had founded communist or incipient communist parties in the Dutch East Indies (1921) and French Indochina (1925). Moreover, the Chinese Kuomintang party—allied with the Chinese Communist Party between 1923 and 1927—actively recruited members to its cause in both locations and in British Malaya. Although the number of people involved in these parties was still relatively small in 1925, the Dutch, British, and French colonial and metropolitan governments devoted enormous energies to tracking their members’ movements, actions, and publications. By this time, colonial authorities throughout Southeast Asia believed that the ‘communist menace’ represented the greatest threat to the stability of colonial rule in Southeast Asia, since communists were believed to be taking orders directly from the Soviet Union. Using archival sources from all three colonies, this paper demonstrates that the ideological positions between global communism and anti-communism were already well entrenched in Southeast Asia before 1945. In this region, the world of spies, counter-spies, covert security agencies, and secret international cooperation commonly associated with the Cold War was already an integral part of the interwar political landscape.