Between Centralizing Orthodoxy and Local Self-Governance: Taiwanese Sinophone Socialism in Hong Kong, 1947–49

This article examines the New Taiwan Series (NTS), a journal published between 1947 and 1948 in Hong Kong by Taiwanese socialists who fled the island following the 228 Uprising. It does so to intervene in ongoing debates in the field of Sinophone studies. While two major theorizations of the Sinophone exist—one that sees the field as a network of minoritized sites that operate against China-centrism, and the other grounding the Sinophone in a lyrical negotiation with cultural China—neither framework is sufficient for understanding the complex subject positions taken by Taiwanese socialists during these years. For the NTS, social activism was not a flattened binary of either ethnic identification with or resistance to a “China” articulated in terms devoid of political-economic analysis. Rather, politics had to dialectically integrate minoritarian aspirations (Taiwanese sovereignty) with majoritarian projects (the Chinese Revolution). The NTS thus encourages us to reimagine the Sinophone in socialist terms, where two analytical lenses—one grounded in the endogenous local and the other in the exogenous revolutionary center—are dialectically intertwined. The NTS navigated the resulting tensions of such a dialectical stance, making it a critical archive of Taiwanese socialist thought before the 1949 rupture.