| Abstract | This thesis explores the origins of East Asian communist movements in Shanghai in the years 1919-1922, paying special attention to the ideological and organizational activities of the Comintern in determining the combination of internationalism and nationalism in the Chinese and Korean communist parties. Despite the innate contradiction between nationalism and internationalism at its birth, the Comintern--in contrast to the Soviet state--was able to maintain a genuine sense of internationalism through the Second Congress of 1920 by fostering the hope of the imminence of world revolution. It was only with the Third Congress' abandonment of the idea of immediate world revolution in 1921 that the proletarian internationalism of the Comintern clearly began to fade. The influence of the Comintern on the communist movements in Shanghai began with the Second Congress. Pak Chin-sun, the leader of the Communist Party of Korea, and the Far Eastern Secretariat were the two agents of the Second Congress in the Far East. Unlike the Communist Party of Korea, which embodied the 'internationalist' element of the Comintern, the Far Eastern Secretariat was essentially a Russian organ, composed exclusively of Russians, and pursuing Russian interests. Thus, the Far Eastern Secretariat's suppression of the Communist Party of Korea in 1921 signaled the triumph of Soviet interests and the suppression of the 'internationalism' of the Comintern in the Far Eastern communist movement. The direct influence of the Comintern on the Chinese communist movement began only in June 1921, when the Korean Communist Party had been already destroyed by the Far Eastern Secretariat. Under the influence of the directives of the Third Congress, internationalism was divested of its anti-imperialist meaning in the Far Eastern revolutionary movements. Anti-imperialism, which originally had been conceived as part of the projected realization of proletarian internationalism in the East, now belonged to the stage of bourgeois democratic revolution. The Chinese communists finally accepted this separation of nationalism and internationalism in May 1922. Nationalism, not internationalism, was henceforth to be the driving spirit in East Asian communist movements. |
