Bombs in Beijing and Delhi: The Global Spread of Bomb-Making Technology and the Revolutionary Terrorism in Modern China and India

In early 1910, Chinese revolutionaries attempted to assassinate the regent of the Qing Empire by planting a bomb near his residence in Beijing. Two years later, an explosive of a similar type was used by Indian revolutionaries in their attempted assassination of the viceroy of the British Raj in Delhi. Investigating these two seemingly unconnected events demonstrates that radical political activists in both China and India acquired their explosive-making skills from diasporic Russian revolutionaries in Japan and France respectively after the failure of the 1905 Russian Revolution. Although both assassination attempts failed and have largely been marginalized in the national narratives in both countries, the transnational connections between Chinese and Indian revolutionaries in their pursuit of learning the portable dynamite technology overseas sheds light on how modern Chinese and Indian history can be analyzed in a single framework. Staging Chinese and Indian revolutionary terrorism in the context of the cross-boundary circulation of dissident ideologies and technologies in the early twentieth century reexamines marginalized aspects of China's 1911 Revolution and the Indian Nationalist Revolution that can be written as connected transnational history.