The Romantic, the Asianist, the Filipino: Vicente Sotto’s ‘Philippine Republic’

Vicente Sotto was a young, aspiring Cebuano writer and journalist when the Philippines experienced an optimistic interregnum between Spanish and American colonization. This fleeting moment of independence under the first Philippine Republic would shape, in broad strokes, Sotto’s life as a Filipino independence advocate after he self-exiled to British Hong Kong to evade a personal conviction. From 1907 to 1914, he used Hong Kong to establish himself as a staunch crusader for the restoration of the Philippine Republic. He started a newspaper, The Philippine Republic, to call for action, wrote to Hong Kong newspapers to voice his opinions regarding American politics, and joined other Filipino radicals based in the British settlement in exploring potential Japanese collaboration under the Consejo Revolucionario de Filipinas.

The Filipino alliance ended in tatters due to diverging visions, yet Vicente Sotto, having appeased to the American government, re-emerged in the Philippines a bold politician until his death in 1950. This study delves into Vicente Sotto’s revolutionary entanglements in British Hong Kong to reconsider anticolonial revolution in modern Asia as a complex narrative layered by Asianist, nationalist, and personal struggles. It seeks, through kaleidoscopic lens, to review the Filipino search for independence as a disorganized process splintered by individual desires and aspirations.