Russia and the Roots of the Chinese Revolution, 1896-1911
Don C. PriceEarly Chinese revolutionary thinkers studied Peter the Great. Simultaneously Peter was praised as a reformer who strengthened his nation, and condemned as a leader who tyrannized his people and followed a rapacious foreign policy. These Chinese intellectuals also studied in the later Russian revolutionary movement, which they saw as a broadly humanitarian impulse, a struggle for liberty and justice. They detached it from Russia’s scheme for national aggrandizement.
Price concludes that the Chinese nationalist impetus led as logically to a reformist position as to a revolutionary one. He sees in the Chinese revolutionaries’ enthusiasm for their Russian counterparts the emergent internationalist and Utopian strains so important to the later course of the Chinese revolution and to Sino-Russian relations.