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

From the above, one can see that the main objective of the teaching
methods at the university was the effective correlation of theory and
practice. In fact, Stalin sums up the philosophical foundations of this
teaching method when he states, "Theory is the experience of the working-class
movement in all countries taken in its general aspect. Of
course, theory becomes purposeless if it is not connected with revolutionary
practice, just as practice gropes in the dark if its path is not
illumined by revolutionary theory. But theory can become a tremendous
force in the working-class movement if it is built up in indissoluble
connection with revolutionary practice." 16
The authorities of Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow, in working
out the above-described teaching methods, probably had this statement
as a guide. These methods had far-reaching influence. The similarity
of teaching methods subsequently employed in some colleges and
universities in Communist China is not coincidental.
Notes
1. Nevertheless, many Sun Yat-sen University graduates were selected to undertake
advanced study in such higher academic institutions as the Institute for Red Professors, the
Political-Military Academy in Leningrad, the China Problems Research Institute, the Military
Academy in Moscow, and the industrial academy. Those who studied at such institutions were,
of course, being prepared to assume important political, educational, industrial, and military
posts under the Party back in China.
2. Fan writes, "From the early years of Western Chou to modern times, Chinese history
has spanned a period of over three thousand years. Phenomenally, this huge collection of
data exhibits the multifarious rise and decline, the order and chaos, of dynasties, with more
chaos than order. But essentially, the problem is but one, the problem of land ownership,
i.e., the struggle of the peasants against the landlord class for the right of ownership of the
land" (Fan Wen-Ian, "Nien-ch'u chung-kuo san ch'ien nien li-shih te yueh-shih" [The key
to the study of three thousand years of Chinese history], in Fan Wen-Ian, ed., Chung-\uo
t'ung-shih chien pien [History of China, short course; Shanghai: East China People's Publishing
Co., 1950], p.5).
Chu Chen-chih, in his book Modern History, says that Radek wrote a book called The
Taiping Rebellion, in which Radek asserts that the Taiping Rebellion was a peasant movement
containing elements of bourgeois revolution (as referred to by Chien Yu-wen in Chien's
article "Ma-\'e-sze hsueh-p'ai te T'ai-p'ing t'ien \uo shih-\uan" [Marxist historical view of
the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom], in Wen-t'i yu nien-chu [Issues and studies; Taipei], vol.
2, no. 3 [Feb. 20, 1962]). This contention is similar to Fan's idea that in the second stage
the bourgeois rallied the peasants in their struggle for land. In fact, on March 14, 1925,
Radek published an article in Pravda in commemoration of Dr. Sun Yat-sen, and in it he
said that the leader of the Taiping Rebellion, Hun Hsiu-chuan, was the predecessor of Sun
Yat-sen—an opinion which he was to repeat many times in his course, The History of the
Chinese Revolution.
3. J. Stalin, Dialectical and Historical Materialism (London: Lawrence and Wishart Ltd.,
1941), p. 5.
4. Ibid., p. 5.
5. Ibid., p. 18.
6. Stalin, "The Prospects of the Revolution in China," Worlds (Moscow: Foreign Languages
Publishing House, 1954), VIII, 379.
7. Ibid., p. 380.
8. I had the pleasure of meeting him again ten years later (1937) at the Air Force station
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