Historians of early Communism in China have traced the transmission of these ideas to two intersecting trends: the growing interest in Marxism-Leninism among Chinese intellectuals at the end of WWI and the Comintern’s efforts to export revolution to China. The Chinese Communist Party (formed 1921) was therefore the brainchild of radical Chinese activists in Shanghai and Beijing, and Soviet mediators. Far less attention has been paid to the significant Chinese diasporic population in Russia itself. In addition to migrants in the Russian Far East, some 100,000 Chinese labourers took part in the tsarist war effort in European Russia. Many fought in the Red Army. Others joined socialist organisations fostered by the Soviets and led by Chinese students. This was the first direct point of contact between Chinese actors and Bolshevik ideology. This paper examines the early reception of Bolshevik ideas among Chinese migrants by focusing on their main diasporic organisation, the Association of Chinese Workers in Russia, and its leader Liu Zerong. Both Liu and the Association were cultivated by the Soviets early on, with Liu participating in the first and second Comintern congresses as well as meeting Lenin personally. Nevertheless, the Association’s hoped-for revolutionary potential was never realised and the Soviets eventually devoted greater attention to China itself - a notable contrast to the activities of the Korean diaspora in Russia. Through an analysis of the Association’s antecedents, leadership and internal discourses, this paper argues for the uniqueness of Chinese migrants’ experience of Communism and the uneasy balance between class-based and nationalist activism that mitigated against a closer adherence to the Soviet project.
