Chinese Internationalism during the Spanish Civil War

The present essay deals with internationalism in the Chinese revolution, in particular during the second half of the 1930s, when in the West the Spanish civil war broke out and became a crucial testing ground for the international anti-fascist forces, while in China the Communist Party was combating the Japanese occupation. The text is divided into three parts, each of which tries to address a different expression of Chinese internationalism. The first section analyzes the role played by this ideal in Mao’s thought, his eulogy of Norman Bethune and his vision of the ‘internationalist spirit’. The second section focuses on the Chinese contribution to the International Brigades: in fact, there were in Spain some groups of Chinese volunteers who had not been dispatched by the CCP and joined the front on a spontaneous basis. Their lives shed light on a lesser-known form of internationalism from below. In the final part, then, the text explores the anarchist perspective about the Spanish Civil War and the debate inside the CCP on the distinction between war and revolution.