Revolution and Civil War, episode 6

Sun Turns to Moscow

Sun Yat-sen, the revolutionary who founded the Nationalist Party and was briefly the republic's first president, has spent five years trying to rule from Guangzhou with other men's armies, and in June 1922 his own general Chen Jiongming turns his guns on him. The episode follows Sun from the gunboat where he hides for weeks, joined by a young officer named Chiang Kai-shek, to his decision to take Soviet money and advisers and the Communists into his party, and Chiang's own journey to Moscow, while the powers settle China's affairs among themselves at Washington and the northern generals fight for Beijing; it asks why Sun turned to Moscow and what each side meant to get. It leans on the Nationalists' own insider history and on scholars, with the British journalist Arthur Ransome and Bertrand Russell as outside witnesses.

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Transcript

Last time, the Chinese Communist Party was born, in a hurry. The French police raided its founding congress in Shanghai, and the delegates finished their work on a boat on a lake, shouting long live the party they had just made. They chose as their leader Chen Duxiu, who was not even there. He was in Guangzhou, working for the general who ran the city, Chen Jiongming. And in the north, a war that barely got fought had thrown Duan Qirui and his friends out of Beijing, and left the capital to the generals who beat him. The appeal of the Russian revolution in China had soared when Moscow announced it would give up its special rights in Manchuria and cancel the tsars' unequal treaties. To the long suffering Chinese, it was a thunderbolt of goodwill. This time, we go to Guangzhou ourselves, to meet the man that general was supposed to be serving. He is the most famous revolutionary in China. He has no army of his own. And by the end of this episode he will have one, paid for by Moscow. And we will meet a young officer who comes to him at the lowest point of his life, and is never forgotten for it. But first, let's go a very long way from China, to Washington, as the year the Communist Party was founded came to an end. The war had been over for three years, and the great naval powers were spending ruinous sums on battleships to fight the next one. President Warren Harding's government invited them to Washington to talk about stopping. The conference opened in November 1921 and ran into February. Nine countries took part, and China was one of them. And it opened with a bombshell. The American secretary of state, Charles Evans Hughes, stood up at the first session and proposed that the powers scrap dozens of their own battleships, naming the ships one by one. The admirals in the room were horrified. The public loved it. At the top of the table, the United States, Britain and Japan agreed to restrict the size of their battle fleets. It was the first great arms limitation treaty of the century. For every five tons of capital ships Britain and America kept, Japan could keep three. And something else ended at Washington. For twenty years Britain and Japan had been formal allies. Now that alliance was quietly replaced by a looser agreement among four powers, America, Britain, France and Japan, to respect one another's possessions in the Pacific. The Americans had wanted the alliance gone. They suspected, with good reason, that Japan was the power they would one day have to watch. But for China, the business that mattered was Shandong. At Paris, the peace conference had handed Germany's rights in that province to Japan, and Chinese students had brought down a government over it. Japan's grip on Shandong went back to the war, when it had seized the German colony at Qingdao, and to 1915, when it had pressed a list of demands on Yuan Shikai's government that would have made much of China a Japanese protectorate. Leading China's case at Washington was Gu Weijun, a young diplomat with an American education, who had already argued China's case at Paris and refused to sign the treaty there. He was in his early thirties, born in Shanghai and trained in law and diplomacy at Columbia University in New York, and he would go on to represent China in one capital after another for decades to come. Gu was proud and he was careful. When there was talk of the conference organising international aid for China, he made it plain that China would have none of it. "China will bitterly oppose any Conference plan to offer China international aid." Help from the powers, as China had learned, usually came with a bill. Shandong was settled outside the main conference, in talks between China and Japan, with the Americans and British in the room. The Japanese bargained hard. And then, at the last moment, they gave way. Why? Because American opinion had been roused over Shandong, and the American delegates feared that if Japan did not give way, the Senate would refuse to ratify the treaties that made up the whole work of the conference. So they leaned on Tokyo. By the treaty, China recovered everything in Shandong except the private property of Japanese subjects, and some restrictions over the railway. The railway was the sticking point. The Chinese offered to buy it back at once. A patriotic movement among their merchants had already raised about half the money. Japan refused. So China would pay for it over the years instead, and until it did, Japanese staff would keep a hand on the line. Britain, not to be outdone, announced that it too would hand back a small naval base it held on the Shandong coast, at Weihaiwei. It took its time about it. The handover did not happen for years. Still, in December 1922 Japanese troops left Qingdao, and the Chinese flag went back up over the port whose fate had started the May Fourth protests. It was a real victory, and it came three years after the students of Beijing had marched over it. Without their anger, and the anger of the merchants who raised the money for the railway, it is hard to see the powers bothering. One of the sharpest commentators on all of this was a man who had spent most of the previous year in China. Bertrand Russell, the British philosopher, had lectured in Beijing and toured the country, and he followed the conference from home with a cold eye. On the whole, he thought, China did better at Washington than anyone could have expected. But look at what was left off the table. Nobody at Washington raised the question of Manchuria and Inner Mongolia at all. Japan's position there, he wrote, was secure until such time as the Chinese, or the Russians, or both together, were strong enough to challenge it. Hold on to that sentence. It is a pretty fair summary of the next twenty odd years. And look at who was not at the table at all. The Bolsheviks had not been invited to Washington, so they were bound by nothing agreed there. That mattered more than it seemed. The one great power on China's border that had signed nothing at Washington was the one that had just offered to give up its privileges. Moscow was free to make its own deals in China, with whoever it liked. The other powers made promises too. China's import duties would be revised up to an effective five per cent. And the powers pledged themselves to respect China's sovereignty and its borders. China's delegates also asked for the foreign courts to go, and for the right to set their own tariffs. They got commissions to study both questions, which is what governments give you when they mean no. The pledge was the Nine Power Treaty. It promised a great deal and enforced nothing. The philosopher's verdict on the new arrangement was characteristically dry. America, Britain, France and Japan, he wrote, "have agreed to exploit China in combination, not competitively." In effect, the Washington system ratified imperialism in China. The treaty ports stayed. The foreign courts stayed. The gunboats stayed on China's rivers. If you were a Chinese patriot looking for a friend among the great powers, Washington told you where you would not find one. And there was one Chinese patriot who had been looking for a friend among the great powers for thirty years.

So let's go to the patriot who needed a friend more than anyone. Sun Yat-sen was fifty five years old in the winter of 1921. He was born to a farming family in the south, near Macau, schooled in Hawaii and trained as a doctor in Hong Kong. For most of his life he had plotted against China's last dynasty, raising money among the Chinese overseas and launching risings that failed one after another. Sun Yat-sen, whom some of you have followed from his first failed rising in Guangzhou to his exile in Japan. When the dynasty fell in 1912, Sun was made the first president of the new republic. He held the office for a few weeks, and then handed it to Yuan Shikai, the general with the biggest army. He had spent the years since in and out of exile, launching a second revolution against Yuan Shikai that failed within weeks, and then plotting from Japan and Shanghai. That was the lesson of Sun's life so far. He had the ideas, the name and the following. Somebody else always had the guns. His ideas fit into a phrase, the Three Principles of the People. Nationalism, which meant a China strong and free of foreign control. Democracy, a government answerable to the people. And the people's livelihood, a fairer share of the land and the wealth. He was a dreamer on a grand scale. He drew up plans for railways across the whole of China, for great new ports and canals, all to be built with foreign capital he never quite managed to raise. The people who loved him found him inspiring. The people who worked for him often found him exhausting. He was stubborn, sure of himself, and very rarely willing to share the leadership of anything. His party had gone through several names. In 1919 he renamed it the Kuomintang, which means the Nationalist Party, and its members are the Nationalists. Since 1917 he had been trying, on and off, to rule from Guangzhou, the great southern port, as the head of a rival government to the generals in Beijing. Guangzhou was the great city of the south, the old gateway for foreign trade, a short steamer ride up the river from British Hong Kong. Whoever held it held the richest province in the south. In the spring of 1921, what was left of the old parliament in Guangzhou elected him president of China, a title nobody outside the south recognised. But even there his authority was never unchallenged. The Guangzhou establishment was split into factions, and he had no army of his own. By late 1921 the army that mattered in Guangzhou belonged to Chen Jiongming, a general from the Guangdong coast, who had driven out the province's previous masters and invited Sun back. Chen Jiongming was an unusual general. He had flirted with anarchism, he built schools, he held elections for county magistrates, and he invited Chen Duxiu, the future Communist leader, to run the province's education. His idea was a federal China of self governing provinces, built from the bottom up. Sun's idea was a single revolutionary government, built from the top down, by conquest if need be. On paper, Sun was supreme in the south, or at least in Guangdong. In fact, all the military and civil power was in Chen's hands. And the two men wanted different things. Sun wanted a strong central government, and an early military expedition north to overthrow the warlords. Chen wanted to make Guangdong a model province first. That autumn Sun went north west, to the city of Guilin in Guangxi province, to gather troops for his expedition. The road north ran through Hunan, whose ruler, Zhao Hengti, was already dealing with Wu Peifu. And Chen Jiongming, who had stayed behind in Guangzhou, encouraged Zhao to block Sun's way through the province. So Sun waited in Guilin, with an expedition that could not move. And at the end of December 1921, a visitor came to see him in Guilin. It was Maring, the Dutchman from the Comintern, who had sat in on the founding of the Chinese Communist Party a few months before. That party now had just 123 members, and Maring did not consider it a serious organisation. He had come to look for something more serious. And he had found Sun's party. Maring made Sun a proposal. Turn your party toward the masses. And build a school to train military cadres for the Chinese revolution. In effect, he was offering Soviet cooperation with the Kuomintang, in a united front with the little Communist Party. Then, on his travels in the south that winter, he saw something that impressed him. In January 1922 the Chinese seamen of Hong Kong went on strike against their British employers, and the Nationalists stood behind them. Tens of thousands of seamen and dock workers walked out, Hong Kong's harbour stood still for weeks, and in the end the British owners gave way and raised their wages. For a communist looking for a mass movement in China, that was the most interesting thing he had seen. The workers were moving, and Sun's party was standing next to them. Sun listened. He agreed that the Communists could join his party. But he was pessimistic about whether the two parties could ever really work together. He also gave the Dutchman a lecture on his own ideas. Sun liked to say that his Three Principles already held everything worth having in Marx, and a good deal from China's own tradition besides. And for the moment, he wanted no formal alliance with Moscow. Sun still hoped for help from the Western powers, and he still meant to win his war in the north by himself. Maring went back to Moscow and argued that Sun's party was the vehicle for the Chinese revolution, and that the Communists should work inside it. Moscow agreed. As for Sun's war in the north, that was about to become very difficult.

Because in the north, the generals had gone back to war. The victors of the last war, Wu Peifu of the Zhili clique and Zhang Zuolin of Manchuria, had shared Beijing for less than two years, and now they fought over it. Sun had picked his side. He had made an alliance of convenience with Zhang Zuolin, and with Duan Qirui, his old enemy, all against Wu. Zhang Zuolin was a small, quiet man with a soft voice and a hard reputation, who ran Manchuria like a private estate and had grown rich on it. Japan, whose railway zone ran through the heart of his territory, kept a careful eye on him. It was a strange company for a revolutionary. But Sun's view had always been that the enemy of his enemy was worth a telegram. The war broke out in the spring of 1922, and it was short. Wu Peifu was the better general, and his men were better led. The fighting ran along the railways south and east of Beijing, and within days Zhang's armies were falling back. On the third of May 1922, Zhang Zuolin was beaten near Changxindian, on the railway that ran south from Beijing to Hankou, and he had to fall back on Manchuria, whose independence he proclaimed. The philosopher put it in a sentence. Wu Peifu had defeated Zhang and made himself master of Beijing. He did not stay beaten. Back in Mukden, his capital, he spent the next two years rebuilding his army and enlarging his arsenal, and waiting for his chance. The last battle, at the pass of Shanhaiguan where the Great Wall meets the sea, was inconclusive, and the two sides made a truce, signed aboard a British cruiser lying near the scene of the fighting. Now Wu Peifu dominated everything in Beijing. Left to himself, he might have governed without a president or a capital at all. But he was persuaded that foreign relations needed a capital and the forms of a central government. On the fourth of June, the victorious Wu expelled the president, Xu Shichang. And he called back the old parliament, the one that had been driven out in 1917, and put Li Yuanhong, the man who had been president when it was driven out, back in office. Li Yuanhong was the same president whose quarrel with Duan Qirui had ended with the boy emperor back on the throne for twelve days in 1917. Now he was back, because Wu Peifu wanted a respectable face at the front of the government. The parliament came back to Beijing, and so did the old constitution. It looked, for a moment, as if the republic might start again. It did not. Within a year, the same parliament would be bribed, member by member, to elect Wu's patron, Cao Kun, as president. The correspondent of The Times in Beijing reported that Wu would support the old parliament up to the limit, if it worked in the national interest, and fight anyone who obstructed it. The Times even called Wu the Liberal leader. The philosopher was not so sure. Wu, he wrote, "may well prove no more satisfactory than" the Liberal leaders at home in Britain. It was a fair guess. Within a year Wu's troops would shoot down striking railway workers on that same line south of Beijing, and the dream of a liberal general would die with them. And note who else had noticed Wu. In 1922 Moscow's envoys were sounding him out as a possible partner too. Moscow was shopping for a Chinese ally, and it was not fussy. For Sun, Wu's victory was a disaster. His northern allies had lost. His own expedition was stalled. And his own general in Guangzhou was about to turn on him.

The quarrel between Sun and Chen Jiongming had been building all spring. Chen, despite the agreement between them, had cut off the supply of Sun's funds, and Sun felt himself locked up in Guangxi with no money for his troops. From Chen's side, the grievance was just as real. Sun's campaigns were paid for by Guangdong's taxes, and Guangdong was tired of paying for Sun's wars in other provinces. In March 1922, Deng Keng, Chen's own chief of staff, was murdered by a hired killer. The man who paid him was an associate of Chen's, who objected to Deng's loyalty to Sun. Deng Keng had been Sun's most important friend inside Chen's army. With him gone, Sun had lost his eyes and ears there. Wu Zhihui, who tried to settle the affair, put the quarrel in a single line. If Sun wanted to monopolise all power, he was an adventurer. If Chen usurped Sun's power, he was an ordinary militarist. Nobody was persuaded. At the end of April, Sun came back to Guangzhou, and at once dismissed Chen from his posts. He was certain of his authority. The party was his, the government was his, and in his mind the army was his too. It was not. Chen withdrew from the city, but not far, and his troops stayed where they were. Sun stayed in his official residence on a hill in the city, with his young wife, Soong Ching-ling. She was the daughter of a rich Shanghai family, educated in America, and she had married Sun in Japan in 1915, against her parents' fury. She was twenty six years younger than he was. Her father, Charlie Soong, a Methodist printer and businessman, had been one of Sun's oldest backers, and Ching-ling had come to work for Sun as his secretary. To marry her, Sun divorced the wife his family had chosen for him in his youth. On the night of the sixteenth of June 1922, Chen Jiongming ordered his men to attack Sun's residence. The coup took Sun completely by surprise. He had been warned only an hour or two before. Two comrades came to warn him, and Sun slipped out of the house in secret with them. His wife refused to go with him. If she were with him, she said, her presence would give him away. So Soong Ching-ling stayed behind as the attack began. Picture where she was. A young woman in a house on a hill, with her bodyguards around her, and outside an army that had marched under her husband's flag only months before. Protected by her bodyguards, several of whom were killed, she fought her way out through the machine gun fire. She was pregnant at the time, and in the weeks after her escape she lost the child. She never had another. In the fire that swept the residence, Sun's manuscripts were destroyed, among them the drafts of a great work he meant to publish as The Reconstruction of the State. So Sun fled Guangzhou in the dead of night, as his own general's troops tried to seize power in the city. It is worth pausing on what had happened. For five years Sun had tried to rule the south with other men's armies. Now one of those armies had nearly killed him. Chen Jiongming was not a simple bandit, and he had ideas of his own. But in the end he was one more general with an army, deciding who ruled. The lesson, for anyone watching, was simple. Never again could Sun depend on a general he did not control. If the revolution was to have an army, it would have to be the party's own.

Sun made it to the river. Most of the navy at Guangzhou stayed loyal to him, and he took refuge with it, setting up on one of its gunboats, the Yongfeng. The ship anchored on the river below the city, and for five weeks, as the fighting raged between Chen's troops and the army that was still loyal to Sun, she lay off the riverbank. From her deck, Sun had the navy's guns fire on Chen's positions in the city. He was hoping that his Second Army, campaigning in Jiangxi province to the north, would fight its way back home and reconquer the province. And then, on the twenty ninth of June, a young officer came aboard to join him. Let me tell you who he was, because we will be spending a great deal of time with him. His name was Chiang Kai-shek. Chiang was thirty four, from the coastal province of Zhejiang, south of Shanghai. He had studied military science in Japan and served in the Japanese army, and he had fought in the revolution of 1911. He was the son of a salt merchant in a small town in the hills near Ningbo. His father died when he was a boy, and he was raised by a mother he revered for the rest of his life. He joined Sun's revolutionary league as a cadet in Japan, and he would always think of himself as a soldier, and as Sun's disciple. His mentor in revolutionary politics had been a man named Chen Qimei, until Yuan Shikai had Chen assassinated in 1916. After that Chiang drifted around Shanghai for some years, in and out of Sun's service. He had a ferocious temper, and a habit of resigning and storming home whenever he felt unappreciated. He had done just that a few weeks earlier. But when the news came from Guangzhou, he came straight back. In Shanghai he had also spent time as a broker on the city's new stock exchange, alongside friends from Zhejiang who would later help bankroll the party. And he kept a diary, almost every day of his adult life, full of self criticism, resolutions and grievances. He did not come empty handed. Before he left Shanghai, Chiang went to Yu Xiaqing, the president of the city's general chamber of commerce and a longtime backer of Sun. Yu advanced him sixty thousand silver dollars for the cause. On the twenty ninth of June 1922 he joined Sun on the Yongfeng, which lay at anchor off Whampoa. Whampoa was an island in the river, a few miles below Guangzhou. Remember the name. For those five weeks, Chiang had Sun almost to himself, on the gunboat in the river. For a young officer who had spent years on the fringes, it was a chance no money could buy, weeks at the side of the most famous revolutionary in China, with almost nobody else to talk to. The news was all bad. Chen Jiongming had defeated Xu Chongzhi, the commander of Sun's Second Army, as well as Sun's allies from the provinces of Yunnan and Guizhou. There was no army coming to rescue them. On the ninth of August, a British warship agreed to take Sun and his party to Hong Kong. Think about that for a moment. The man who could not get a loan or an adviser out of Britain owed his escape to a British ship. Britain was happy enough to see him safely out of Guangzhou. From there they took a liner north to Shanghai, where Sun had a house in the French Concession. He was back in exile, in his own country. It was there, that autumn, that Sun began to meet Moscow's envoys in earnest. Maring came to see him again, and this time Sun was ready to listen. But something had happened on that ship. Chiang's time alone with Sun aboard the Yongfeng was the turning point in his career. He had shared the danger when almost everyone else had gone. Sun did not forget it. Chiang wrote a little book about those weeks on the river, and Sun wrote a preface for it. And the gunboat would come back into our story too. After Sun's death it was renamed in his honour, and one day it would be at the centre of a very strange night in Guangzhou.

So where does a man go, when he has lost his city, his army and his manuscripts, and the Western powers will not help him? Sun had asked them. He wanted British and American officers to train an army for him, and he failed to get them. In the end he was forced to turn to Russia. He had written to the Americans and the British for years, asking for loans, advisers, recognition, anything. To London and Washington he was a troublemaker who held one province by courtesy of its generals. They preferred to deal with whoever held Beijing. A British journalist named Arthur Ransome heard how Sun himself had explained it, from an old Chinese friend of Sun's who was with him when he made up his mind. The republic was his child, Sun said, and it was in danger of drowning. "I am trying to keep it afloat and we are being swept down the river." When the West only jeered at him, he would clutch at whatever was held out to him, even a Russian straw. It is a striking image, and a revealing one. Sun did not say he had been converted to anything. He said he was drowning. The straw arrived in the person of Adolph Joffe. By now the Bolsheviks had won their civil war, and at the end of 1922 their state took a new name: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the Soviet Union. Joffe was one of the Soviet Union's senior diplomats, the man who had negotiated Russia's peace with Germany in 1918. He had come to China in 1922 to negotiate with the government in Beijing, and he was getting nowhere. He was also a sick man, and after his talks with Sun he went on to Japan, partly to rest and partly to talk to the Japanese. Beijing would not deal with Moscow while Soviet troops sat in Outer Mongolia. So Joffe looked south, to the one Chinese leader who might. On the seventeenth of January 1923 Joffe visited Sun in Shanghai, and set out a detailed plan of cooperation. There would be Soviet weapons and Soviet cash. The Communists would be admitted into Sun's party. And the party would be reorganised along Marxist Leninist lines. The two men put their names to a joint statement, published at the end of January. People call it the Sun Joffe Manifesto. In it, Sun stated his own view plainly. The communist order, or even the Soviet system, could not actually be introduced into China. Joffe agreed. China's most pressing problem, they declared, was to achieve unification and full national independence. And in that great task, Joffe assured Sun, "China has the warmest sympathy of the Russian people and can count on the support of Russia." Joffe also reaffirmed Moscow's offer of 1920, to give up all the treaties and exactions the tsars had imposed on China. But read the small print, and the deal had a price. Sun accepted that the Chinese Eastern Railway, the great Russian line across Manchuria, would go on being managed by the Russians for the time being. And he accepted that Soviet troops could stay in Outer Mongolia. They had marched in during 1921, chasing the last of the White Russian armies, and set up a Mongolian revolutionary government under their protection. Joffe declared that Moscow had no imperialist designs on Outer Mongolia and no wish to see it leave China. So Sun did not think an immediate withdrawal of Russian troops was either necessary or in China's interest. Sun added that Zhang Zuolin, back in Manchuria, should be consulted on the railway. In other words, China's most famous nationalist had just agreed that a foreign army could stay on land China claimed. That is how badly he needed a friend. Why did Sun do it? Part of it was simple. Of all the Western nations, he believed, Russia alone had shown benevolence and justice toward China. And from the other side, the logic was just as clear. In the Soviet view, China was far too backward for a socialist revolution, so the first stage would have to be led by the Nationalists. Moscow backed its words with money. In response to Sun's request, it provided two million gold rubles. Joffe asked Sun to keep the strictest secrecy about all of it. One hostile foreign observer put it down to persuasion. A reasoned explanation of what the Soviet state stood for, he wrote, so captured Sun in Shanghai in 1923 that he decided to let the Communists into his party. Not long afterwards, Sun's trusted aide Liao Zhongkai went with Joffe to a hot spring resort in Japan, where Joffe was resting, to talk through what Russia really wanted. Liao was one of Sun's oldest followers, a money man and an organiser, born in America, and he was more drawn to the left than most of Sun's circle. He had been with Sun since the days of the revolutionary league in Japan, and Sun trusted him with the party's money and, now, with its dealings with Moscow. At one point he asked Joffe straight out whether communism could be achieved in Russia in ten years. No, said Joffe. In twenty years? No. In a hundred years? Perhaps, said Joffe. So communism was a matter for a century from now. The national revolution, Sun's revolution, was a matter for today. That was exactly the bargain the manifesto had struck. Liao came back to Guangzhou in March 1923 to report. And Sun became more and more convinced that he had to work hand in hand with Russia, against the imperialist powers. For Sun, the deal was beginning to look like the best he would ever get. Russia asked him to change his party, not his principles. By then Sun had a city again. In January 1923, troops from Yunnan and Guangxi, hired with Sun's promises, drove Chen Jiongming out of Guangzhou, and in February Sun came back. They were mercenaries, loyal to whoever paid them, and Chen was still in the hills to the east with his army. But it was a base. And now the Russians were coming to help him hold it. At the end of 1923 the foreign powers reminded Sun what they thought of him. When he threatened to take over the customs revenues collected at Guangzhou, which the powers held for the repayment of China's foreign debts, they sent a fleet of warships up the river to stop him. Sun backed down. And he drew the obvious conclusion about which foreigners were his friends.

The man the Russians sent was not a diplomat. He was an organiser. On the thirty first of July 1923, at Stalin's suggestion, the ruling Politburo of the Russian Communist Party decided to send Mikhail Borodin to Sun. Stalin, at that point, was one of the party's senior leaders in Moscow, its general secretary, not yet its master. Borodin was a veteran revolutionary who had lived for years in America, in Chicago, running a school for immigrants, and had worked for the Comintern in Mexico and in Britain. He had been born in the Russian empire, joined the revolutionary movement young, and fled to America after the failed revolution of 1905. He came home after the Bolsheviks took power, and went to work for Lenin's new International. He spoke excellent English. So did Sun, who had been educated in English since boyhood, and the two men did most of their business in it, without an interpreter. Sun's sister in law, Soong Mei-ling, remembered him as a tall, commanding presence with a leonine head. She was the youngest of the Soong sisters, and a few years later she would marry Chiang Kai-shek. In October 1923 Borodin arrived in Guangzhou, carrying a letter of introduction from Lev Karakhan, now the Soviet envoy in Beijing. Karakhan regretted that he could not come himself. "You can trust Borodin as you may trust me," he wrote. And Borodin made a particularly good impression on Sun. He told Sun that he had come to put himself at the service of China's national revolution. Their enemy was the same, foreign imperialism. As for communism, China was not in a position to discuss it, since conditions were not right. In the West, Borodin explained, it was right to preach communism and the class war. In the East, and in China above all, Moscow's policy was to promote the national revolution. Moscow had told the Chinese Communists to concentrate on that, rather than on communism. And since Sun's own principle of the people's livelihood was opposed to capitalism, Borodin argued, the ultimate aims of Sun's party and the Comintern did not conflict. He praised the Three Principles of the People. All the revolutionaries in China, he said, the Communists included, should work for them under Sun's leadership. And then he told Sun the truth about his party. There were very serious shortcomings, he said. The party's organisation was very incomplete, and "there is no discipline worth speaking of." He was right. The Nationalists in Guangzhou were a loose collection of veterans, factions and hangers on, held together by Sun's name. Sun appointed Borodin adviser to the party, with the special task of helping him reorganise it. Borodin was adviser to the Nationalists, but he was at the same time the representative of the Comintern, and its servant first of all. Sun can hardly have missed it. He had taken help from Japanese adventurers, overseas merchants and southern warlords in his time. A Russian with a mission was simply the latest. He got to work at once. He drafted a new constitution for the party on the model of the Russian Communist Party, with cells at the bottom, committees above them, and a central executive committee at the top whose orders were binding. He set up training classes for party workers, a party newspaper, and departments to organise workers, peasants, women and young people. Sun's party had been a club of old revolutionaries. Borodin set out to make it a machine. And within weeks he had his chance to show what organisation could do. In November 1923 Chen Jiongming's army came back out of the east and almost reached Guangzhou. Borodin urged Sun to rally the city's workers and the peasants round about with promises, of lower rents and better pay, and the party's volunteers helped hold the line. One of his jobs was a delicate one. He had to talk Sun out of launching a military expedition against the northern warlords before he was ready. Sun had been talking about marching north for years, and every attempt had collapsed. Borodin's view was that a party with no organisation and an army it did not control could not win, however many times it tried. In public, Borodin heaped praise on Sun. In his confidential reports to Moscow, he called Sun very backward, and egotistical. The journalist recorded Borodin's own account, and it was frank. He had come to Guangzhou, Borodin said, on a voyage of discovery, and found Sun in very great difficulties. And Borodin had a phrase for the kind of communism he thought China could manage. The only communism possible in China today, Borodin told him, "is the Communism of poverty, a lot of people eating rice with chopsticks out of an almost empty bowl." What Borodin really did, the journalist thought, was change the way Sun worked. First he taught Sun to rely on a party instead of on himself. Then he taught him to rely on whole classes of people, rather than on individuals. For a man who had spent his life relying on a few loyal friends and the next general with an army, that was a revolution in itself.

Before Borodin had even arrived, Sun had sent someone the other way. On the sixteenth of August 1923, Sun sent a special mission to the Soviet Union. At its head he put Chiang Kai-shek, a man he trusted. He wrote to Lenin and Trotsky, introducing Chiang as his most trusted deputy. Being chosen by Sun for the job raised the young officer's standing in the party enormously. Two other men might have expected it. Wang Jingwei and Hu Hanmin were Sun's right and left hands, his senior disciples, and they were in Shanghai at the time. Sun kept them in the dark. Hu Hanmin was a scholar and editor, one of Sun's oldest lieutenants, with a sharp pen and a sharper tongue. Wang Jingwei in particular, Sun wrote to Chiang, was no student of the Russian school, and would not agree to the Russian kind of revolution. Wang was the party's most glamorous figure, a poet and orator who in 1910 had tried to assassinate the regent of the empire with a bomb, and had been sentenced to life in prison for it. We will be seeing a great deal of him. Chiang went with a plan of his own. With him went three other delegates, two of them Communists, among them a young man named Zhang Tailei. The mission reached Moscow in early September, and spent three months there. Chiang toured Red Army units and military schools, visited Petrograd, and sat through long meetings with party officials. His strategy called for a Soviet supported Nationalist base in the far north west of China, from which the party could attack the government in Beijing. The Russians were not keen. Sklyansky, the deputy head of the Red Army, told Chiang that military operations in China would only be possible after a great deal of political work. Otherwise, he said, it would be an adventure "doomed to failure." Chiang also met Trotsky himself. Trotsky promised weapons, advisers and aid. But Moscow, he said, would not send troops. Trotsky's advice was the same as everyone else's in Moscow. Build the party first, spread its message, win over the people. The fighting could come later. For an officer who had come to Moscow with a plan for a war, it was not what he wanted to hear. Chiang also found himself lectured by the Comintern, and he lectured it back. He told its committee directly that proletarian revolution was not appropriate for China. He was upset when the Comintern then passed a resolution on China that stressed the role of the workers and peasants, flatly contradicting what he had told it. When the Russians suggested that he join the Communist Party himself, Chiang replied that he would first have to ask Sun's permission. It was a polite way of saying no. He had no intention of joining any communist party. He wrote home in a way that kept everyone happy. He was reading Marx's Capital, he said: "I find the first half of this work very heavy-going," but "the second half is both profound and entrancing." He knew perfectly well that his letters were being read. And of Trotsky he wrote, "I enjoyed Mr. Trotsky, whose essential qualifications for being a revolutionary are patience and activity." So what did Chiang really think of the Soviet Union? Here the sources disagree. The Nationalists' own account says that Chiang reported very favourably on the Russian system, and that his report made the reorganisation of the party inevitable. But in his private diary Chiang called the Soviet government conceited and autocratic. Either way, the trip made his career. It suddenly made him the party's principal expert on the powerful and still mysterious country to the north. And it gave him something every ambitious officer in Guangzhou would have envied: the trust of Sun, and the attention of Moscow, at the same time. A few months after he got home, Chiang wrote to Liao Zhongkai with a warning. Russia's real aim, he believed, was to make the Chinese Communists its heirs in China, not the Nationalists. Sun went ahead regardless. But Chiang never let go of his doubts. On the fifteenth of December 1923, Chiang got off a Russian freighter in Shanghai, and was met on the quay by Liao Zhongkai. He had seen the Red Army up close, and the party that controlled it. Whatever he thought of the Bolsheviks, he had seen what a party with its own army could do. And Sun was about to give him the chance to build one.

For the Chinese Communists, the alliance was not their idea, and most of them did not like it. Neither the Nationalists nor the Communists were enthusiastic about an alliance. But the Comintern insisted. Moscow was asking a party of just 195 Communists to ally with Sun's party of ten thousand. In August 1922 the Communist leaders met by the West Lake at Hangzhou, and Maring put Moscow's line to them. Members of the Communist Party were to join Sun's party as well. Chen Duxiu and most of the others objected. They had founded their party to make a revolution of the workers, not to serve under an old nationalist with a taste for generals. Maring reminded them that the Comintern's decisions were binding. They depended on Moscow's money, and in the end they had no real choice. They agreed, unanimously, to enter the Kuomintang. In early September 1922, Sun welcomed Chen Duxiu, Li Dazhao, Cai Hesen and Zhang Tailei into his party. The Communist Party had gone on record in favour of a united front in 1922. Sun took more convincing. But since he could find no other allies, he accepted it the following year. The key was the form it took. Sun agreed to let members of the Chinese Communist Party join the Kuomintang as individuals. The arrangement had a name in Moscow, the bloc within. The Communists would stay a separate party, with their own discipline and their own leaders, while working inside the Nationalist Party as ordinary members. There would be no alliance of equals. The Communists would come into Sun's house, one at a time, and live by his rules. Mao Zedong was among those who joined Sun's party, and he threw himself into the alliance more readily than many of his comrades. The next summer the Communist Party held its third congress, in Guangzhou itself, under Sun's protection, and voted to make the alliance work. Mao was there, and it was at that congress that he was elected to the central committee. He came away convinced, for now, that the way forward was inside Sun's party. What had changed their minds, as much as Moscow's orders, was Wu Peifu. In February 1923 his troops had broken a strike on the railway south of Beijing by shooting the strikers. The Communists who had organised that strike learned what a liberal general was worth. Sun's own people were alarmed. Was he letting a Trojan horse inside the walls? Sun had an answer for them. The Communists, he said, were joining his party in order to work for the national revolution. And Sun had reason to feel sure of himself. His party was far bigger, far older and far better known than the little party now joining it. And Sun had a picture for who was in charge. "We merely yoke up the Soviet Union and mount it," he promised. Russia was the horse. Sun meant to ride it. Of course, the Russians had a picture too. In theirs, the Nationalist Party was the horse. He also told his followers what they had to learn. "We must learn from Russia its methods, its organization, its way of training party members; only then can we hope for victory." Sun's answer to those fears was plain. If the party built itself a strong organisation, and its members submitted to its discipline, it had nothing to fear from Communist schemes. And if the Communists ever betrayed the Kuomintang, he said, "I will be the first to propose their expulsion." Not everyone believed him. Some of the old revolutionaries quietly disagreed but dared not say so, because they always obeyed Sun. Others opposed the Russian turn openly, and left the party over it. Two loyalties under one roof. For now, Sun's word held it together. Think about the shape of what Sun had built. A Nationalist party, paid and advised by Moscow, with Communists inside it who answered to their own party and to the Comintern. Everyone in it was promising loyalty to someone. As long as Sun lived, his name kept those promises in one piece. The question nobody asked out loud was what would happen when he was gone. And it worked, at first, beyond anyone's hopes. In the wake of the united front, hundreds of young organisers from both parties went into the factories and the workshops to organise the workers. By 1924 there were over 120 Communist cells in greater Shanghai alone. For a party that had founded itself on a pleasure boat with a few dozen members, that was an astonishing change. Under Sun's banner, the Communists were reaching people they could never have reached alone. The cooperation between Sun and the Soviets gave the tiny Communist Party a crucial chance to grow. And for Sun, the money kept coming. Something like three million rubles went to his party between 1923 and 1927, and the Comintern sent well over a hundred advisers. So what did each side mean to get? Moscow wanted a strong, friendly China on its flank, a blow at the British and Japanese empires, and a home for its little Chinese party to grow inside. The Communists wanted a way to reach the masses, and cover while they did it. And Sun wanted what he had wanted all his life: the guns, the money and the discipline to unite China under his own revolution. Each of them was sure the others were the junior partner. For all its tensions, the united front was enormously successful, for both parties. Think back to where Sun was eighteen months earlier, on a gunboat in the river, with a single loyal officer and a borrowed bag of silver. His wife had lost their child, his city had been taken, and his manuscripts had burned. The Western powers had shown him the door. Now he had a patron, a programme and a party remade on the Soviet model. And he had the makings of an army. Sun wanted a school to train officers for a professional party army, the thing he had never had. He appointed Chiang Kai-shek its commandant, and Liao Zhongkai its party commissar. It would stand on that island in the river below Guangzhou, off which Chiang had joined Sun on the gunboat. Whampoa. Next time, the academy opens its gates, and Sun makes his last journey, to Beijing.

Sources

• Alexander V. Pantsov and Steven I. Levine, Mao: The Real Story (2012), pp. 99-100, 100-101, 104-105, 105-107, 107-108, 113-114, 116-119, 125-127, 127-128, 138-139
• Arthur Ransome, The Chinese Puzzle (1927), pp. 80-82, 85-87, 87-89, https://archive.org/details/chinesepuzzle00rans
• B. L. Putnam Weale, Why China Sees Red (1925), pp. 39-42, 84-87, https://archive.org/details/whychinaseesred008608mbp
• Bertrand Russell, The Problem of China (1922), https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13940
• Jay Taylor, The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China (2009), pp. 31-32, 34-35, 37-38, 39-41, 41-42, 42-44, 44-45
• Peter Zarrow, China in War and Revolution, 1895-1949 (2005), pp. 194-196, 198-199, 199-200, 202-203, 204-205, 231-232, 237-238
• Rana Mitter, Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 (2013)
• T'ang Leang-li, The Inner History of the Chinese Revolution (1930), pp. 136-138, 140-142, 142-144, 144-146, 154-156, 156-158, 158-160, 160-161, 176-178, 178-180, https://archive.org/details/innerhistoryofch0000unse