Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
The Soviets wanted to export their Bolshevik Revolution, and
Russian interest in China increased after the May Fourth protests.
Their purpose was to advance China from feudalism to capitalism
and, ultimately, to socialism. Accordingly, Soviet agents from the
Comintern, an international organization that sought to export the
Bolshevik Revolution to other countries and guide them along
the Marxist-Leninist paradigm for revolution and social salvation,
searched for suitable candidates for a bourgeois revolution in China.
At first they thought warlords could fill this role, but after several
warlords rebuffed Soviet overtures, the Soviets finally “discovered”
Sun Yat-sen in southern China and identified him as their man. They
planned to use Sun Yat-sen to accomplish the bourgeois revolution
and then dispose of him after he outlived his usefulness and a new
socialist revolution had taken hold in China.
Sun Yat-sen himself was by no means a Communist and clearly
rejected communism as unsuitable for China. He was, however, inter-
ested in working with the Communists temporarily in order to achieve
his immediate objective of toppling the warlord-dominated govern-
ments in China and achieving real and lasting national unification.
Sun turned to the Communists and the Soviet Union because no other
Western nation showed much interest in cooperating with his political
program for China. By the early 1920s he was thoroughly disillusioned
with the West and regarded the Soviet Union as the only European
power even remotely interested in seeing a republic established in
China. Accordingly, in 1922, he allowed Chinese Communists to join
his own Nationalist Party, but he made it clear that they were joining
as individuals, not as a political bloc. Sun did not envision or approve
of a union between the two parties. Both parties, then, hoped to outlive
the other after national unification and the defeat of the warlords.
Only one party could win at this precarious game, and in 1949 the
Communists emerged as the victorious party.
Sun's decision to admit the Chinese Communists into the National-
ist Party is still controversial. Some rabidly anti-Communist officials in
his own party objected adamantly to this, but he overruled them and
argued that all Chinese had the right to join in his revolution and that
Soviet aid might go elsewhere in China if he refused to accommodate
the Chinese Communists. Besides, he argued, there was some concep-
tual overlap between his Three Principles of the People and Marxist-
Leninist ideas.
Accordingly, in the early 1920s, the Soviets sent an agent to help Sun
achieve this alliance between the two parties and also to help him reor-
ganize the Nationalist party along more Leninist, Bolshevik lines.
