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

For example, following the Plenum of the ECCI in November, 1926,
about thirty Sun Yat-sen University students were drafted to join
M. N. Roy's mission to China. Thus, allowing for such dropouts, an
estimate of about five hundred students actually studying at the university
at the end of 1926 and the beginning of 1927 seems reasonable.
A majority of these came directly from China; but some of them arrived
from the United States, Germany, France, the Philippines, and
other countries.
One alumnus of Sun Yat-sen University states:
The group from China was the most diverse. There were dudes and belles,
housewives and mistresses, soldiers, laborers, and farmers, although students predominated.
According to Marxist classifications, ninety percent of them were
petty bourgeoisie. This great diversity of backgrounds thus also explains the
tremendous differences in their levels of education, ranging from nearly illiterate
to scholarly graduate students or even professors. After the Communist revolts at
Nanchang and Canton in 1927, the number of students of the university increased
rapidly, although there was also a corresponding decline in their quality. 11
The above account is not exaggerated, for the academic plan and arrangement
of classes had to take this great diversity into account.
The arrangement of classes was sometimes based on the linguistic
qualifications of the students. For example, in the first and second
graduating classes there were the so-called English Class, the Russian
Class, and the Semi-Russian Class; and the students in these groups
received most of their instruction in the foreign language that they
already were able to understand. In the English Class, for example,
lectures were delivered in English, and in it were people who either
had studied in the United States or had otherwise acquired facility in
English. Students in the Russian Class included people who had
studied Russian in China or who had rapidly picked up the language
in Russia. In the Semi-Russian Class an interpreter was used only
part of the time. This procedure somewhat alleviated the chronic
shortage of Russian-Chinese interpreters. It also facilitated communication
between students and instructors, which the process of interpreting
made burdensome and time-consuming.
On my arrival at the university in November of 1926,1 was enrolled
in the tenth class of the second graduating class, all meetings of which
were addressed through Chinese-language interpreters. Later I moved
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