The Chinese Nationalist Kuomintang and its
relation to Communism
In late March 1923, Henk Sneevliet
wrote bitterly to Bukharin from Shanghai. ‘The situation is such that it cannot
go on. I have hardly any personal friends, mainly because I lead the existence
of an Ahasverus [Ahasuerus].’ He had abandoned stable
relationships and lucrative posts in the Netherlands and Java for the cause.
But he lacked a definite attachment to any one movement. He had asked to work
with his closest comrade, Roy, but had been sent instead to China in
1921. His domestic situation was disastrous: he had lost money on his arrest in
Vienna. He had ever since been locked in dispute – over accounting for the £4,000
he had been given for the trip – with Comintern
clerks who knew nothing of the high cost of living as a European in the
colonies. He had failed to support his wife and two boys, who remained in Java
after his expulsion in 1918. His wife, Betsy, now forty-three years old, had
made ends meet as a teacher but now needed to bring the boys on home leave to
the Netherlands. Because of her marriage to Sneevliet
and charges relating to her handling illegal literature, she would not return
to Java. Moreover, following a three-week stay in Moscow in the summer of 1922,
Sneevliet had fallen in love with a
twenty-six-year-old factory worker, Sima Lvovna Zholkovskaya, a Bolshevik
Party member from the illegal period. They had traveled to China together,
sharing a third-class billet, and she was now pregnant with his child. Sneevliet asked to return to Europe, to work with Roy, to
see his two boys, ‘and explain to my first wife, in a way that would give her
the least pain, that I love another woman and live with her.’1
Sneevliet had returned to China in August 1922 with the task of
enforcing the will of the Comintern as he understood
it. On 29–30 August, he met the Chinese Communist Party leaders on the West
Lake in Hangzhou. For the first time, the leading personalities of the movement
from home and abroad were gathered in one place, many of whom had not attended
the Party Congress in Shanghai the previous year. Li Dazhao
traveled from Beijing; Chen Duxiu had returned to
Shanghai from the south; Cai Hesen was back in China
following his expulsion from France for his part in the student demonstration
in Lyon. By all accounts, the meeting was tense. Sneevliet
declared that party members should join the Kuomintang and act as a ‘bloc
within’ its various bodies. The strategy, including Chen Duxiu,
convinced not all present, but Sneevliet pressed his
argument in his abrasive, commissarial way, and, invoking Comintern
discipline, carried the meeting. Afterward, Li Dazhao
met with Sun Yat-sen in Shanghai to secure his
agreement to the first communists joining the otherwise considered right-wing Nationalist Kuomintang; these included
Chen Duxiu, Cai Hesen, and
Li himself. But Sneevliet could no longer claim a
monopoly of Comintern wisdom. Cai Hesen’s
extensive experience of Europe made him disinclined to defer Moscow's issues of
revolutionary internationalism. Chen Duxiu returned
from the Fourth Congress in Moscow at the end of 1922 with a concession from
the central leadership that, while the ‘bloc within’ remained the priority, the
Chinese Communist Party should nevertheless retain its own organization and
undertake its own educational efforts among the masses. Moscow also endorsed
the importance of work among the peasantry in general terms. Sneevliet returned to Moscow briefly between late December
1922 and early January 1923 to fight his corner. He rejected the notion that
‘approximately 250 Chinese communists’ alone could build a mass organization.
Without cooperation with the nationalists, they were ‘a meaningless sect’.2
But a series of local experiments were already
underway towards building the party through workers’ education. A group around
Zhang Guotao approached the concentrations of
proletarians in northern China, particularly in Shanghai and – working through
an alliance of convenience with the regional warlord Wu Peifu
– on the Beijing to Hankou railway, where a young Beida
graduate, Deng Zhongxia, traveled as a train
inspector to reach the working communities along the railway lines. Outside the
oppressive political atmosphere of Beijing, he helped establish a model school
at Changxindian, a railway town ten miles to the
south of the capital, to instill a ‘sense of common interest and discipline.’
He and his fellow student workers adapted their scholarly persona to the new
work and taught class struggle and anti-imperialism in colloquial language and
everyday analogies.3 Perhaps the most successful initiative – accounting for a
fifth of paid-up Chinese Communist Party members at the time – was at Anyuan, a settlement of 13,000 coal miners and 1,000 railwaymen on the mountainous border between Hunan and
Jiangxi provinces. A group led it from Hunan that included Mao Zedong, who was
working at the time as a schoolteacher in the provincial capital, Changsha, and
two returnees from overseas: Li Lisan, expelled from
France in 1921, and Liu Shaoqi, one of the first Chinese students to be sent to
Moscow. Mao had never set foot overseas. His own rural childhood in the region
made him particularly well placed to translate the revolutionary message to the
workforce and refashion himself as a new scholar. As at Changxindian,
the emphasis was not on doctrinaire Marxism, but on a more elemental call for
dignity and equality under the slogan, ‘Once beasts of burden, now we will be
human.’ It was pursued through workers’ night schools, cooperatives, and Red
cultural activities – art, film, and drama – and when successful strike action
was launched at Anyuan in 1922, it was preceded by
careful negotiation with the local triads – who held the real power in the
region – to maintain discipline and to avoid the snare of violence.4 Unknown to
the central party leadership, another experiment led by a returned student from
Waseda University in Japan, Peng Pai, set up a
peasant association in Haifeng in the eastern coastal region of Guangdong
province, where his family was prominent landowners.5 Over time, the workers of
Anyuan would return to their homes in Hunan and
Jiangxi and take the lead in establishing peasant associations of their
own.
All this was undertaken in plain sight and dependent
on the tacit toleration of local warlords and the Kuomintang alliance. But Sun Yat-sen was an uncertain ally. Only his ejection from
Canton by forces loyal to Chen Jiongming had
persuaded him to endorse the alliance with the Communists. In February 1923,
with outside troops' support – so-called ‘guest armies’ – Chen Jiongming was ousted from the city and withdrew into the
northeast of Guangdong province. Sun Yat-sen was able
to return to establish a new government. Before he left Shanghai, after a
series of meetings at the Palace Hotel and at Sun’s mansion, on 26 January
1923, Sun signed a cooperation with the new Soviet ambassador, Adolph Joffe,
the man who had led the Soviet delegation at Brest-Litovsk. Sun’s foreign
affairs adviser, Eugene Chen, lauded it as a breach in the encirclement by the ‘Anglo-Latin
conquerors’ that would elevate Sun to the status of a global leader. But, as
Joffe was fully aware, Sun hoped that the western powers might ultimately
support his goals.6 Many of his closest aides bitterly opposed the policy of
cooperation with the Communists. His son, Sun Ke, a
graduate of the University of California at Berkeley and Columbia University,
newly appointed as mayor of Canton, sought investment from Hong Kong. Even
before the Sun-Joffe Manifesto announcement, Eugene Chen laid plans with the
British for a visit by Sun to the colony on his return journey to Canton.
Arriving on 17 February, Sun was warmly received by the governor and spoke to
staff and students at the University of Hong Kong, his ‘intellectual
birthplace,’ of his respect for British parliamentary institutions.7
Sneevliet returned to Canton in late April 1923. Since his
departure a year earlier, Canton's transformation into a modernist showpiece,
begun in the late Qing period and continued by Chen Jiongming,
had gathered momentum. The old city walls had come down in 1920–21 to make way
for modern roads – some twenty-six miles by 1922 – with trams and motor cars.
Old temples and monasteries were commandeered as offices and hospitals by the
city authorities. The west end of the Canton Bund was dominated by the
twelve-story Sun Company building, which housed the Hotel Asia, a department
store, and a roof garden: a symbol of the city as it was now promoted to the
outside world. In the battle for ideas, the lines were not yet definitively
drawn. What many thinkers had in common was the idea of a new science for
society. For the Kuomintang leadership, the potential of Canton as a city
of futuristic vision was limitless. Here they might try to manage and
discipline their citizens in ways that had never been attempted by the Qing
empire, which demanded only obedience, the observance of hierarchy and
orthodoxy, and that at a distance. As mayor, Sun Ke
set up a municipal administration on the new eight-storeyed
city bund; streets were widened into boulevards, parks, and schools built. This
remodeling of the city produced a civil police force unique in its scale in
China, with several hundred officers and 4,000 constables.8
The garden suburb of Tungshan,
beside the Canton–Kowloon railway line, with its mission schools and villas,
became an enclave for elites and was also popular with foreigners. Much of the
investment for expansion came from those returning from overseas. Canton’s
public works were designed above all to educate and reform the people. But
despite all this, Greater Canton remained a pre-modern sprawl of workshops and
artisans’ shops, and its multiple forms of transport were dependent on human
labor. According to estimates at the time, only 12.5 percent of its vast
workforce could be considered industrial workers; labor was still dominated by
guilds and locality, kin and clan mentalities.9 But, in many ways, Canton was
the apogee of Asia's village cities, on the edge of empires and of modernity.
Its improvised enclaves were a place of transit for a surge of new arrivals
from the countryside and abroad, an invitation to lose old markers of origin
and forge new solidarities.
Canton was a magnet for adventurers and speculators.
On 19 October 1922, there were six bomb attacks in the city and suburbs. Two
struck hotels: young women, it was said, came in with a handbag, took a room,
then left, the explosion occurring shortly afterward. Room 7 in the Oriental
Hotel was hit, and several rooms blew through on the Hotel Asia's third floor.
The latter was opposite the Canton steamer wharf and described by British
intelligence as a ‘hotbed of intrigue,’ handy for ‘stolen visits.’10 A bridge
and a newspaper office were also targeted. A forty-eight-year-old doctor
working at the Republican Hospital, Maximillian de Colbert, was arrested. A
‘stout, active man with a Hohenzollern mustache,’ he had acted as chief surgeon
to Sun Yat-sen’s northern campaign. The military
authorities, who initially apprehended him and claimed to have been watching
him for some time, uncovered bomb 150,000 men in arms, most of them ragged and
hungry, and in the aftermath of the war, large swathes of the delta region were
under the local sway of an underworld of bandit gangs.11 Peasants and townsmen,
rich and poor alike, were hit by a host of new taxes as Sun Yat-sen
sought to rebuild his regime. Sun’s position came under renewed assault in
early 1923, as the armies of neighboring provinces who had helped him regain
Canton now turned on him, and Cheng Jiongming
launched a new offensive. Sun’s desperate need for material aid pulled him
behind the Soviet alliance. This was provided in the form of 2 million Mexican
silver dollars. There was a deepening sense, too, that the revolution needed a
period of military rule to secure itself, a view that, to several Sun’s
advisers, had been borne out by the Red Army, in which some 10,000 Chinese had
fought while in Russia.12 In this period, Sun and Sneevliet
met often. But despite his advocacy for the alliance, Sneevliet
felt that Sun’s military situation was desperate and planned his own escape
from the city. As he told a colleague in Shanghai, ‘the Sun's soldiers will
take one day or the other be defeated … When Sun has to leave, I have to take
care not to stay here one day longer.’ Sneevliet sent
his companion, Sima, ahead of him on the long,
dangerous journey through Manchuria, but he himself tarried to make a final
attempt to convince the communist leaders of the need for the alliance with the
Kuomintang.13
Between 12 and 20 June 1923, the party leaders
convened for the first time in Canton, in a modest house near Sneevliet’s more ambassadorial residence in Tungshan, for their Third Congress. It was the only place
they could meet openly, under Sun’s protection. The mood was grim. The ‘little Moscows’ established in scattered communities of industrial
workers across China had come under attack. The first leaf to fall was in
October 1922, when a strike within the 30,000 labor force with the largely
British-owned coal mine at Kailuan was put down when
Indian guards and Chinese police fired on a crowd.14 Then, a strike on the
Beijing to Hankou railway ended on 7 February 1923 in a bloodbath of
thirty-seven workers at the hands of the forces of Wu Peifu.
Zhang Guotao, instrumental in the party's early
organization and the railway workers, reported that four labor leaders' heads
were hung from telegraph poles at the railway station at Changxindian.
This was a profound shock to the leaders, the end of what quickly became seen
as a ‘golden era’ of labor mobilization. It also marked the breakdown of
cooperation with the warlords in the north.15 In Shanghai, harassment by the
police in the International Settlement drove the party deep underground. Chen Duxiu lamented that cadres ‘often do not have complete
faith in the party’; regional leaders had little sense of a ‘party’ at all. In
the face of these setbacks, Sneevliet argued that the
Kuomintang's revolutionary potential was closer to the ideal than that of the Sarekat Islam in Java and that the Chinese Communist Party
should enter it en masse. But Sneevliet
then faced accusations that he wanted to dissolve the party entirely. This was
baffling to Sneevliet, who thought it was clear –
playing a long game. But there was little reason for the others to share his
faith in it. Mao Zedong told the gathering that the party should cut its own
path with the peasantry. The ‘bloc within’ strategy prevailed, only by Chen Duxiu’s casting a vote. With Chen as its chair and Mao as
its secretary, the newly elected central committee quickly and quietly returned
to Shanghai.16 As Sneevliet made plans to return to
‘Mecca,’ he wrote again to Bukharin to complain that the Comintern’s
Executive ‘still revel in fantasies about the mass party, ours, in China.’17
Sun Yat-sen offered Sneevliet
the opportunity to stay, employed within the Kuomintang as a full-time adviser.
He was also offered a smaller role running the Soviet news agency, ROSTA, in
Canton. Both would have stabilized his finances, but Sneevliet
was disillusioned with Sun and with the Comintern,
and with his capacity to shape events further.18
Passing through Shanghai, Sneevliet
ran into Chiang Kai-shek, who was also traveling to Moscow. Chiang was born
into a merchant family of rural Zhejiang in 1887 and escaped its constraints
and an unhappy arranged marriage through his attempts to win a scholarship to
study at a military school in Japan. Initiated there from 1907 into the
tight-knit circles of revolution-minded cadets. After two years in a Japanese
artillery regiment, he returned secretly to Shanghai in late 1911 to join the
Wuchang uprising. He became actively involved in Sun Yat-sen’s
operations against Yuan Shikai. Shuttling between Shanghai
and Japan between 1912 and 1918, Chiang displayed an ability to cultivate
personal networks among the business elite and its dark underbelly, Shanghai's
urban gangs. He developed an antipathy to capitalism but was very willing to
use its resources to advance the revolution. He was a military adviser to Sun Yat-sen during his first attempt to set up a Canton regime
in 1918.19 He surprised Sun – surprised everyone – by responding swiftly to
Sun’s plea for help when Chen Jiongming’s troops
seized the presidential palace in Canton in June 1922. As they headed into
exile together, the two men forged what Chiang later described as ‘a wordless
rapport’. Chiang was feared and mistrusted in equal measure by the other, older
members of Sun’s entourage, in his own words, for being ‘wild and
ungovernable.’ Chiang’s outsider’s air and reputation for unpredictability
endured. But through growing self-discipline and self-cultivation by reading,
he positioned himself as one of Sun’s most steadfast followers.20
Chiang’s moment arrived when he traveled with an
introduction to Lenin from Sun that named him as Sun’s ‘most trusted’ deputy.
Chiang proceeded behind Sneevliet, but the two men
spent a good deal of time together in Moscow, as Chiang was there for three
months inspecting military facilities. Trotsky told Chiang that the Soviet
Union would not send troops into China, but weapons, money, and military
advisers. He urged him not to rely on military force alone: ‘a good newspaper
is better than a bad division’.21 Chiang was impressed with Trotsky’s candor.
He was impressed with aspects of the new society, especially the youth
organizations, but recorded in his diary that many Soviet high officials were
‘cads and rascals.’His meeting with Zinoviev and the Comintern Executive did not go well. He told them the
Chinese revolution happened in stages, and he was not able to embrace
Bolshevism and class struggle openly. Chiang was stung by the ‘superficial and
unrealistic’ Comintern communiqué that was issued
after the meeting, which urged an opposite course: ‘It considers itself the
center of the world revolution, which is really too fabricated and arrogant.’22
Nevertheless, Chiang’s visit raised Comintern's hopes
for their alliance with the Kuomintang, and Chiang remained deeply impressed by
the promise of material aid. At Harbin, Sneevliet
also met the entourage of a newly formed mission en
route to Sun Yat-sen. Michael Borodin (Mikhail Markovich
Gruzenberg) led it. Since his return from
Mexico, Borodin had continued to work underground as a Comintern
talent scout. He had recently returned from a visit to Britain, as ‘Georg
Braun/George Brown,’ a Czech or a Yugoslav, traveling from Hamburg to Grimsby
on 15 July 1922. He was arrested on a tip-off from Scotland Yard on 22 August,
only two and a half hours after he arrived in Glasgow, with £38 in his pocket
but no documentation, just as he was about to begin a lecture at the Labour College. The police identified him as ‘a Communist
emissary’ after gleaning from him a long, unverifiable story of complex
ancestry, dubious nationality, constant movement, and an unconvincing cover
which involved research on the urban motion: traffic, underground railways, the
flow of crowds along thoroughfares and the provision of public toilets. He was
deported after serving six months in HM Prison Barlinnie
in Scotland.23 Several months after his return to Moscow, he was chosen, ahead
of Voitinsky, to lead the expedition to China. This
surprised some, but he had a formidable reputation as a ‘missionary’ for
Bolshevism. He spoke English well so that he could speak directly to Sun Yat-sen, and he claimed that they had come across each
other in his Chicago days, although it was not clear that Sun remembered
this.
From Harbin, Borodin traveled swiftly to Shanghai and
steamed to Canton, managing to bypass Hong Kong, where the British watched for
him. He was welcomed on the day of his arrival by Sun Yat-sen
as ‘China’s Lafayette.’ On 15 October, he spoke beside Sun on several platforms
in the city, the first occasions in some time that Sun had appeared at public
gatherings. It was the first time that the people of Canton had seen a veteran
Russian Bolshevik.24 Borodin moved swiftly to reorganize the Kuomintang along
Leninist lines. He won his spurs in mid-November at a moment when Sun was
preparing once more to go into exile, and the forces of Chen Jiongming looked likely to breakthrough in the north and
advanced on Canton. Borodin urged mass resistance; Kuomintang cadres were
dispatched to the front, and the line was held. The Borodin mansion in Tungshan became a new center of gravity within the
republic. Borodin’s wife, Fanya, acted as his
secretary, and as a new model of a woman in political life, her credentials
burnished by the story – as recounted later by Soong Mei-ling, sister-in-law to
Sun Yat-sen – that she was related to Buster
Keaton.25
Borodin gathered Asian co-workers around him. Like Sneevliet before him, Borodin knew no Chinese. His
principal assistant was Zhang Tailei, an activist from
Tianjin, who, based on rather dubious credentials, had spoken for China at the
Third Congress of the Comintern in 1921. He was an
ardent follower of the Moscow line. Another ally and scribe were Qu Qiubai, a journalist who had reported from Moscow and taught
Chinese to some of the Soviet advisers who came with Borodin. When he came down
to Canton from Shanghai in January 1924, it provoked the caustic observation
that Borodin ‘treats our party just as if we were a provider of
interpreters.’26 In many ways, international communism was a mighty translation
machine. Qu was indeed a brilliant renderer of Russian Marxist and sociological
texts into Chinese in its newly emerging modern form.27 Like all translations,
this was a creative process. By accident or design, Chinese party translations
of Lenin’s theses on the ‘National and Colonial Questions’ of 1920 tended to
amplify the language of M. N. Roy’s ‘supplementary’ theses and the need to
confront the national bourgeoisie more immediately and cultivate the peasantry.28
To this end, cadres began to reappear in Canton and to recruit from the
powerful waterfront unions and men banished from places like British Malaya.29
1. H. Maring to Bukharin, 21
March 1923, in Tony Saich, The Origins of the First
United Front in China: The Role of Sneevliet (Alias Maring), vol. II, Leiden, Brill, 1991, pp. 475–80.
2. Ibid., pp. 137–8.
3. Zhang Guotao, ‘Report of
the Beijing Communist Group’ (July 1921), in Tony Saich
(ed.), The Rise to Power of the Chinese Communist Party: Documents and
Analysis, Armonk, NY, M. E. Sharpe, 1996, pp. 19–24; Daniel Y. K. Kwan, Marxist
Intellectuals and the Chinese Labor Movement: A Study of Deng Zhongxia (1894–1933), Seattle, University of Washington
Press, 1997, pp. 22–4, 29–30; David Strand, Rickshaw Beijing: City People and
Politics in the 1920s, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1993, pp.
145–7.
4. Elizabeth J. Perry, ‘Reclaiming the Chinese
Revolution,’ Journal of Asian Studies, 67/4 (2008), pp. 1147–64, and Anyuan: Mining China’s Revolutionary Tradition, Berkeley,
University of California Press, 2012.
5. Fernando Galbiati, P’eng P’ai and the Hai-Lu-Feng
Soviet, Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 1985, pp. 168–9.
6. Allen S. Whiting, Soviet Policies in China,
1917–1924, Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 1954, pp. 181–207. For Chen
see Shao Chuan Leng and
Norman D. Palmer, Sun Yat-sen and Communism, New
York, Praeger, 1960, pp. 64–5.
7. F. Gilbert Chan, ‘An Alternative to
Kuomintang-Communist Collaboration: Sun Yat-Sen and
Hong Kong, January–June 1923’, Modern Asian Studies, 13/1 (1979), pp.
127–39.
8. Wilbur C. Martin, ‘Problems of Starting a
Revolutionary Base: Sun Yatsen and Canton, 1923’,
Bulletin of the Institute of Modern History (Taipei), 2/4 (1971), pp.
1–63.
9. For the republican city see Michael Tsin, ‘Canton Remapped’, in Joseph W. Esherick
(ed.), Remaking the Chinese City: Modernity and National Identity, 1900–1950,
Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press, 2000, pp. 19–29; Johnathan A. Farris,
Dwelling on the Edge of Empires: Foreigners and Architecture in Guangzhou
(Canton), China, Hong Kong, Hong Kong University Press, 2004, ch. 4; Virgil K. Y. Ho, Understanding Canton: Rethinking
Popular Culture in the Republican Period, Oxford, Oxford University Press,
2005, esp. pp. 9–42. For labour see Ming K. Chan,
‘The Realpolitik and Legacy of Labor Activism and Popular Mobilization in 1920s
Greater Canton’, in Mechthild Leutner
et al. (eds), The Chinese Revolution in the 1920s: Between Triumph and
Disaster, London, RoutledgeCurzon, 2002, pp. 187–221,
at p. 188; Chan cites Deng Zhingxia’s 1927
survey.
10. TNA, FO 228/3276, ‘Canton Intelligence Report,
December Quarter, 1922’.
11. Helen F. Siu, Agents and Victims in South China:
Accomplices in Rural Revolution, New Haven, CT, and London, Yale University
Press, 1989, pp. 4–95.
12. Hans J. van de Ven, War and Nationalism in China,
1925–1945, London, RoutledgeCurzon, 2003, pp.
69–71.
13. Sneevliet to Wilde, 30
May 1923, in Saich, The Origins of the First United
Front in China, pp. 488–91.
14. Tim Wright, Coal Mining in China’s Economy and
Society 1895–1937, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1984, pp.
184–6.
15. Zhang Guotao, The Rise
of the Chinese Communist Party, 1921–1927: Volume One of the Autobiography of
Chang Kuo-t’ao, Lawrence, University Press of Kansas,
1971, p. 286; the image of ‘first falling leaves’ is his.
16. Hans J. van de Ven, From Friend to Comrade: The
Founding of the Chinese Communist Party, 1920–1927, Berkeley, University of
California Press, 1992, pp. 106–7; Zhang, The Rise of the Chinese Communist
Party, pp. 296–312.
17. Sneevliet to Bukharin,
31 May 1923, in Saich, The Origins of the First
United Front in China, p. 496.
18. Ibid.
19. For Chiang’s early life see Jay Taylor, The
Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-Shek and the Struggle for Modern China, Cambridge,
MA, Harvard University Press, 2009, ch. 1; Jonathan Fenby, Chiang Kai Shek: China’s
Generalissimo and the Nation He Lost, part I, London, Hachette UK, 2009, chs 1–3.
20. Pichon P. Y. Loh, The
Early Chiang Kai-Shek: A Study of his Personality and Politics, 1887–1924, New
York, Columbia University Press, 1971, Chiang diary quotation at p. 64; for the
Canton coup see pp. 69–73.
21. David R. Stone, ‘Soviet Arms Exports in the
1920s’, Journal of Contemporary History, 48/1 (2013), pp. 57–77, at p.
69.
22. Taylor, The Generalissimo, pp. 43–4; Yang Tianshi, ‘Perspectives on Chiang Kaishek’s
Early Thought from his Unpublished Diary’, in Leutner
et al. (eds), The Chinese Revolution in the 1920s, pp. 77–97, at pp.
90–91.
23. TNA, HO 382/2, Inspector Ewen McCaskill, ‘Michael
Borodin alias Georg Braun alias George Brown’, 7 September 1922.
24. Aleksandr Ivanovich Cherepanov, As Military Adviser in China, Moscow, Progress,
1982, pp. 29–30.
25. Mei-ling Soong, Madam Chiang, Conversations with
Mikhail Borodin, London, Free Chinese Centre, 1978, p. 4.
26. Quoted in Ishikawa Yoshihiro, ‘The Chinese
National Revolution and the Eighth ECCI Plenum: Exploring the Role of the Chinese
delegate “Chugunov”’, in Roland Felber,
A. M. Grigoriev, Mechthild Leutner
and M. L. Titarenko (eds), The Chinese Revolution in
the 1920s, pp. 141–55, at p. 148.
27. For Zhang’s role see Cherepanov,
As Military Adviser in China, p. 45, and for his background Yoshihiro Ishikawa,
The Formation of the Chinese Communist Party, New York, Columbia University
Press, 2013, pp. 209–20. For Qu see Elizabeth McGuire, Red at Heart: How
Chinese Communists Fell in Love with the Russian Revolution, New York, Oxford
University Press, 2017, p. 71; Tani Barlow,
‘“History’s Coffin Can Never Be Closed”: Qu Qiubai
Translates Social Science’, Boundary 2, 43/3 (2016), pp. 253–86.
28. Alexander Pantsov, The
Bolsheviks and the Chinese Revolution, 1919–1927, Curzon Press, Richmond, 2000,
pp. 66–9.
29. Kwan, Marxist Intellectuals and the Chinese Labor
Movement, pp. 88–91; TNA, CO 537/925, MBPI, September 1924.
For updates click homepage here