Hi
I'm from Brisbane Community Action and am engaged in transcribing and editing 'A History of the Korean Anarchist Movement' by Ha Ki-Rak in order to make it more easily available to groups around the world. There is mention of an enormous anarchist region in Manchuria, Shinmin, which was founded by the Korean Anarchist Communist Federation and consisted of as many, if not more than, two million people. In the end, this region was destroyed by the Japanese and Bolsheviks. There is very little mention of it, from what I can find, it's only briefly talked about by Alan McSimoin from the Workers Solidarity Movement in Ireland and in Non-Western Anarchism by Jason Adams. I've come across a document by Dongguan Hwang, 'Korean Anarchism before 1945' in Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World, and it correlates a lot of what Ha Ki-Rak says concerning transnational links with the Japanese and Chinese anarchists of that era, but again, doesn't mention Shinmin. I was hoping someone could help dig up more information about this period.
This is about the limit of the information currently available (from Adams)
Over two million Korean immigrants lived within Manchuria at the time when the KACF declared the Shinmin province autonomous and under the administration of the Korean People’s Association. The decentralized, federative structure the association adopted consisted of village councils, district councils and area councils, all of which operated in a cooperative manner to deal with agriculture, education, finance and other vital issues. KACF sections in China, Korea, Japan and elsewhere devoted all their energies towards the success of the Shinmin Rebellion, most of them actually relocating there. Dealing simultaneously with Stalinist Russia’s attempts to overthrow the Shinmin autonomous region and Japan’s imperialist attempts to claim the region for itself, Korean anarchists by 1931 had been crushed.
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Not sure if this helps, as it uses mostly the same sources [Google translation]:
Original: http://www.anarkismo.net/article/15711