Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow, 1925-1930

This dissertation is trying to fill in a missing page in both Chinese and Soviet history. It is known that in the history of Chinese students studying abroad in the first half of the twentieth century, the students who went to the Soviet Union had the most influential impact on shaping the course of modern China. For political reasons and the inaccessibility of archives, no scholarly work has been done on how Chinese students were trained in the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, the Communist International founded a few schools in the 1920s and 1930s to train foreigners making revolutions in their home countries. However, there is no comprehensive study on any of the Comintern schools.;Sun Yat-sen University provides a good case study to gain insight into the extent of Soviet influence in modern China and gives new information on an important, but inadequately understood period in Sino-Soviet relations. In addition, the study probes the interaction between Chinese students and Soviet politics and culture to explore the potential and limits of cultural transmission.;Five years after the establishment of the university, the Comintern claimed it had failed to achieve the goal of training political workers for revolution in China. However, both the Nationalist Party and the Chinese Communist Party greatly benefitted from the Soviet educated students in their knowledge and abilities in party organization, propaganda and intelligence work. Students' educational experience has a great impact on their subsequent careers and on the course of modern Chinese history. The preeminent figures, such as Yang Shangkun, Jiang Jingguo and Deng Xiaoping, were graduates from the university.;The main sources of the dissertation come from the recently accessible key archives in Taiwan (the Central Committee Archives on the Five Divisions and the Hankou Archives preserved by the Historical Commission of the Central Committee of the Kuomintang) and in Russia (the Comintern Archives, maintained by the Russian Center for the Preservation and Studies of Documents of Modern History).