Red Friends: Internationalists in China's Struggle for Liberation

This book recalls the internationalists to whom the CCP, now exclusively focussed on reviving China's great power status, is indebted.

Fresh from fighting White Armies in Siberia, Vladimir Vilensky, head of the Bolsheviks' Far East Bureau, and Grigory Voitinsky laid the foundations of the Chinese Communist Party. Henk Sneevliet drew on his decade battling Dutch colonialism in Indonesia to define its strategy. Russian civil war hero General Blyukher directed the 1926 Northern Expedition against warlordism, while Mikhail Borodin, veteran of 1905, struggled to preserve the fragile KMT-CCP alliance. Following Chiang Kai-shek's 1927 coup, old-school labour militants IWW leader George Hardy and Arthur Ewert worked underground to keep the CCP alive.

After being sprung from a Berlin jail by his girlfriend Olga Benario, Otto Braun went to China to advise the Red Army. Journalists Edgar Snow and Agnes Smedley revealed the Communist guerrillas to the world. When Japan invaded China, exiled writers Hasegawa Teru, Kaji Wataru and Ikeda Yuki risked their lives to subvert the Imperial Army. Two thousand Soviet pilots, led by Spanish Civil War ace Pavel Rychagov, fought for China. After 1949, idealists like atomic scientist Joan Hinton devoted their lives to building New China.