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Paper short abstract

The idea of Indonesian nationalism was generally associated with Japan's right-wing's 'Pan-Asianism', however, Tan Malaka's work, published in 1925 in Canton and Tokyo, implied that Comintern and Chinese as well as Japanese Left had been the source of inspiration for Indonesian nationalism.

Paper long abstract

Tan Malaka, one of the founders of Indonesian (then Dutch Indian) communist party, exiled by the Dutch colonial government in 1922 to the Netherland, attended the Fourth Congress of Comintern in Moscow and later assigned Comintern's Far East representative, based in Shanghai. In 1n 1925, his published "Naar de Republiek Indonesia" ("Toward the Republic of Indonesia"), in which he argued, from the standpoint of a communist, that the coming clash of American imperialism and Japanese imperialism will pave the way for Indonesia's national independence.

It is generally neglected in Indonesia's historical narration that Tan Malaka, a communist, was the first one who had envisioned an independent state of Indonesia. Besides, his argument about the clash of American and Japanese imperialism and its consequence for Indonesia's independence, offers and alternative view generally held hitherto, that Japan's right-wing 'Pan Asianism' movement and Japan's military occupation of Indonesia was the determinant factor for Indonesia's national independence.