In spite of the hopes of many anti-colonial activists, the Treaty of Versailles following the First World War did not stop Western imperialism in Asia and Africa. In response, a number of new religious and political organizations engaged in transnational anticolonial activities and aspired to transform what they believed was an unfair post-war world order. From 1923 to 1924, the Indonesian communist Tan Malaka envisaged a federation of Eastern communists, while the Senegalese Lamine Senghor and Vietnamese Ho Chi Minh, both members of the French Communist Party's Union Intercoloniale, established the Ligue de Defense de la Race Negre. In such organizations, ideas of national liberation were intertwined with pan-regional concepts and ideas of internationalism. Chinese delegates’ participation in the organization of the League Against Imperialism (LAI) was also part of this global zeitgeist among non-Western intellectuals seeking a world free from colonial oppression. Asianist ideas, especially regarding an alliance between India and China, underlined the participation of Indian and Chinese LAI delegates, as Carolien Stolte also shows in her chapter. Indeed, both Indian and Chinese nationalism were channelled through internationalism in the early interwar period.

The idea of the world anticolonial revolution that would end Western imperialism in China, too, was at the heart of the ideology of the Chinese Nationalist Party (Guomindang, GMD, est. 1912). Having evolved in part from international anti-colonial ventures of its founder, “the father of the Chinese nation,” Sun Yat-sen, the GMD propagated Chinese liberation and revival among overseas Chinese communities and fundraised for the revolution among them and foreign powers. From 1923 to 1927, Sun Yat-sen's government in South China allied with the Soviet Union, which provided the GMD with military aid on condition that the GMD restructured after the model of the Bolshevik party and worked in a united front with the then small and young Chinese Communist Party (CCP, est. 1921). By 1927 however, the CCP's resultant membership and influence expansion, especially in the countryside where the CCP undermined the GMD's power base, led the GMD to break the alliance with the CCP and the Comintern.

Internationally, the Comintern initiated the anti-imperialist organizations and all communist parties had anti-imperialist departments. In 1925, the Comintern sent the head of the anti-imperialist department of the American Workers’ Party, Charles Shipman, to Mexico to establish the All-American Anti-imperialist League (AAAIL).