Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow and the Chinese Revolution - KU ...

ers whose sympathies lay with Trotsky. They could present Trotsky's
positions, while criticizing Stalin and the Comintern, and only a hard
core of Comintern loyalists had the heart to argue against them. Thus
it was at this point that Trotskyism at Sun Yat-sen University achieved
its initial thrust, and among those who pushed Trotsky's cause at that
time was Chiang Ching-kuo. He appeared frequently at speakers'
lecterns, usually with a pile of books from which he quoted, supporting
Trotsky's positions. Speakers at such meetings were limited to
five-minute presentations. Young Chiang, functioning like a machine
gun, would frantically leaf through his books while speaking at a great
rate, discover and read off the appropriate quotation at precisely the
right point, and then continue speaking and searching out the next
quotation. He was a brilliantly organized speaker and made maximum
use of the time allotted him. At the same time he was the author of a
good many effectively written essays which were posted on the university's
bulletin boards.
We shall discuss the fate of Trotskyites at Sun Yat-sen University
in later chapters. Here let me anticipate a bit by saying that Chiang
Ching-kuo was not punished for his outspoken support of Trotsky,
although less outspoken Trotskyites were harshly treated. Instead,
Chiang Ching-kuo was sent on from Sun Yat-sen University to attend
a military-political academy in Leningrad. At the time, some of us assumed
that the Soviet authorities chose to overlook his political indiscretions
because of his youth. Subsequently, though, I entertained
the thought that Stalin may well have been keeping Chiang Ching-kuo
up his sleeve, as it were, as a bargaining piece in possible future negotiations
with Chiang Kai-shek. Or perhaps Stalin merely hoped through
Chiang Ching-kuo to have available some sort of a link with the boy's
father in the event that such a link might prove useful in the future.
During the years of the War of Resistance Against Japan and shortly
afterwards, this latter consideration, in fact, did seem to be the case,
although it is beyond the scope of this volume to go into the matter here.
In any event, many of the students at Sun Yat-sen University who
in this trying period came to sympathize with Trotsky's positions eventually
became formal members of the Trotsky opposition. But it was
the hope of those of us who, though our trust had been sorely tried,
remained loyal to Comintern leadership that Comintern and Russian
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