Kill Buddha Singh

Abstract

On the morning of 6 April 1927, the Jemadar of the Sikh branch in the Shanghai Municipal Police, Buddha Singh, had been shot dead by an Indian nationalist. This incident has not drawn much attention from scholars studying modern Chinese history. This article argues that the narrative framework of the Chinese national history fails to provide a space for subjects such as Sikh migrants and nationalists that can hardly be appropriated. By exploring how the Ghadar Party, the Comintern and the Chinese communists cooperated with each other to shatter the British hegemony in Shanghai and how the British colonial authorities forged a coordinative network to check the ever-flowing dissidents, this article reconstructs the dramatic case of Buddha Singh not only in the milieu of the Chinese nationalist revolution, but also in the context of the global anti-imperial and communist movements. In so doing, it challenges the established national narrative and champions an approach that incorporates modern Chinese history into the global history.