Traversing Revolution: Vicente Sotto and the Philippine-Hong Kong Networks

Vicente Sotto is often hailed in contemporary Filipino narratives as the ‘Press Freedom Fighter’ for authoring the new Philippine Republic’s first law on press freedom. His vision, which transpired in the late 1800s with the establishment of several newspapers, was germinated by the Philippine struggle against Spanish, and later, American colonisation of the Islands. Sotto, notwithstanding, was more than that: in 1907, he fled the Philippines to avoid prosecution for falling in love with an underage girl; in 1908, he was a piano man at Hong Kong’s Stag Hotel; in 1909 he joined a secret delegation to Tokyo to explore Filipino-Japanese collaboration; in 1910, he was a leading member of the Hong Kong-based Consejo Revolucionario de Filipinas. In the subsequent years, he would juggle between an olio of roles as a fugitive, a pan-Asianist, a Cebuano writer, and a supporter of the US Democratic Party.

All of these ventures were interwoven by the pre-existing trans-imperial networks that his revolutionary predecessors created in and through British Hong Kong, which eventually catapulted Sotto’s political career to different trajectories. This study takes Sotto’s complex life as a contour to complicate the Philippine anti-colonial struggle as a multi-faceted page in modern Asian history. It reconsiders, first, the first few decades of the twentieth century as an experimental era layered by national, regional, and personal explorations, and second, trans-imperial engagements as stimuli that obfuscated and fragmented anti-colonial revolutionary movements.