Mao Zedong, Skull & Bones, and the Russell family
What if one of the most authoritarian regimes in modern history was masterminded by an ancient, powerful clan?
Foreword
On October 1, 1949, a 55-year-old Mao Zedong proclaimed the victory of the Chinese Communist Party over the KMT atop the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Beijing, marking the end of decades of revolutionary conflict. Few events have altered the shape of the modern world as this, yet the true history of how it came to pass remains woefully obscured.
To get straight to the point, what becomes apparent after doing a bit of digging on Mao and the milieu surrounding Peking University in the early 20th century, is that the creation of the Chinese Communist Party was a carefully managed affair at the hands of an intricate web of forces. These forces include a string of 19th century missionary networks, Yale University, its foreign educational programmes, its most famous secret society, and the Anglo-Norman lineage which acts as the glue to all of the above.
Together, these elements and more worked not just to create the CCP, but to manufacture the cultural and social conditions out of which Chinese Marxism itself emerged. Moreover, those same forces also controlled the Marxists’ Nationalist opposition and directed it to lose while symbiotically birthing communist China in its death throes.
In the following article, we aim to bring some clarity as to how this all unfolded, and also to get a conclusive answer to the question - just how responsible is the Russell clan for the millions dead under the tyranny of Mao Zedong?
The Russell clan and Yale’s 19th century China overtures
The Russells are an Anglo-Norman lineage that has historically claimed descent from Hugh de Rosel, a cupbearer of William the Conqueror who was rewarded with possessions in the county of Dorset following the Norman Conquest of 1066. Examples of Russells that share ancestral ties include: the English lineage well known for holding the Duke of Bedford title and producing such figures as the colonial statesman Lord John Russell and the philosopher Bertrand Russell; the armigerous Scottish Clan Russell with deep roots in Aberdeenshire; the American Russell family associated with the 19th-century China opium trade.
Of the American branch, the New England arm of this clan has its origins in William Russell, who emigrated from England to New Haven, Connecticut, in the 1630s. Connecticut tradition holds that William was of “a branch of the English line so well known” and landed there with members of the Fenwick and Greville family1.
William had a son, Noadiah Russell, who would be among the founding members of Yale University in 1701 alongside another member of the clan, Reverend Samuel Russell. Noadiah would act as a trustee of Yale until his death, and his family line would remain close to the University governance, intermarrying with other Yale-associated families such as the Pierreponts and rising to prominence in Middletown over the course of the 18th century.
In 1824, Samuel Russell of this lineage founded Russell & Company, which quickly became the leading American firm involved in the China opium trade. Just shy of a decade later, William Huntington Russell co-founded Skull & Bones with Alphonso Taft using proceeds from the family opium dealings, and since its formation, every Yale president has either been a member or had personal or familial ties to the Order.
Around a decade after Skull and Bones’ founding — and amid the Second Great Awakening — the long-standing ties between Yale and China began to form, with the alumnus and missionary Peter Parker marking the first to make significant overtures in 1834. Parker became the first full-time Protestant medical missionary in China, opening the first Western-style hospital, the Ophthalmic Hospital in Canton. In this, he was provided the space for the finished hospital and support for its operations by the Chinese Hong merchant Wu Bingjian, who was extensively tied in dealings with Russell & Co. and an associate of Samuel Russell.
Following Parker’s work, more than 30 Yale graduates served as missionaries in China over the course of the 19th century, introducing Western medicine, education, and cultural exchanges, and creating a foothold for Yale within the country. On the opposite end, a pathway between China and Yale was opened up, with Yale alumnus Yung Wing becoming the first Chinese citizen to graduate from an American university in 1854.
Wing’s closest associate at Yale — whom he would go on long walks to discuss ideas of advancing China through education — was Carroll Cutler, who became a Skull & Bonesman in the year they both graduated. Together, Wing and Cutler conceptualised what became the Chinese Educational Mission of 1872 - the very first government-sponsored educational exchange program between China and the West. This programme, put forward by Wing and granted by progressive elements within the Qing regime, saw around 120 young Chinese educated in the United States, with around 30 studying at Yale.
Although the program was cut short by the Qing in 1881, several of these international students would go on to gain prominent positions in the late Qing government, with some playing important roles in facilitating the transition to the early Republic of China. The most significant of these was Tang Shaoyi, a student who came to America on the CEM programme and studied at Columbia University (where he became close friends with Nicholas Murray Butler, the future president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace). Following this, Shaoyi would obtain the role of Western language translator and become the leading assistant in the office of the future leader of the Republic of China, Yuan Shikai, which started in 1885 and continued for around 30 years in the lead-up to the 1911 Xinhai Revolution, which overthrew the Qing.
Before the 1911 Revolution, Yuan Shikai had been the late Qing-era General who, following the Chinese defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894-5, modernised the Chinese army, turning it into his own personally loyal force - the Beiyang Army. The Beiyang Army and Shikai would play a pivotal role in the fall of the Qing Dynasty at the twilight of the 1911 Revolution, when the Qing requested he come out of retirement and use the army to crush the uprising. Here, Shikai agreed to help, but after limited engagements with the revolutionary forces, coordinated with the British agent Sun Yat-Sen to instead install himself as president, replacing Sun’s Provincial-Presidency in exchange for bringing about the abdication of the final Qing, the child Emperor Puyi. The man who would act as chief representative in these abdication negotiations and ultimately secure the Emperor’s abdication was the Chinese Educational Mission alumnus, Tang Shaoyi.
The New Culture Movement
Over the course of the period between his inauguration and his death in 1916, Yuan Shikai and his Beiyang regime became extremely unpopular, as he dismantled China’s republic, revived Confucianism as state ideology, banned Nationalism, dissolved Parliament, made embarrassing concessions to Japan (the Twenty One Demands), and seized dictatorial power. In 1915, Shikai declared himself Emperor of China, shattering the remnants of the Republic and plunging China into a period of warlordism, known as the Warlord Era, which would last until Chiang Kai-shek’s KMT reunified China over a decade later.
It was amid this period of warlordism, and with the sour taste of Shikai’s tyranny, Japanese encroachment, and the lack of establishment of a Republic in general after 1911 in its mouth, that China would go through a dramatic cultural transformation known as the New Culture Movement. The New Culture Movement (1915-20s) was a progressive, anti-traditional, intellectual campaign that held traditional Confucian philosophy up to be the cause of China’s ‘century of humiliation’, consisting of the 19th-century Opium Wars and subordination to Japan and the West in the early 20th century. This Movement called for replacing Confucianism with modern Western ideals: science (sloganised as “Mr. Science”) and democracy (”Mr Democracy”).
The seeds of this movement can be traced back to a crowd of intellectuals in the orbit of an early, anti-authoritarian periodical called The Tiger magazine, founded by the journalist Zhang Shizhao, which critiqued Shikai’s dictatorship and advocated constitutional liberalism. Shizhao was a Western-educated scholar who had studied at the University of Aberdeen, where he was taught under William Leslie Davidson, the Regius Chair of Logic2. Davidson’s own mentor, and the Lord Rector of Aberdeen, was the Scottish inventor and engineer Alexander Bain, a man in a close circle with the philosopher John Stuart Mill; Bertrand Russell’s godfather3 (more on this later).
Based out of Japan, Zhang Shizhao would take the formerly acquainted Chen Duxiu, the future Chinese Communist Party co-founder, who was in exile for anti-Yuan Shizhai activities, under his wing as junior editor of the Tiger. This would not be the only time that Shizhao provided aid to a future founder of the CCP, by the way, being that he woule later also lend Mao Zedong 20,000 yuan when he was destitute at Peking University.
Working for the Tiger Magazine is what helped connect Duxiu to the network of reformers and intellectuals that would form the centre of the New Culture Movement; most pertinently, the fellow future CCP-founder Li Dazhao. Following his work at the Tiger, Chen Duxiu would then go on to found The New Youth magazine, which became the centrepiece of the New Culture Movement. The New Youth took things a step further than the Tiger, launching a radical assault on traditional, Confucian Chinese culture itself, and promoting the Western ideals of science, democracy, and individualism as the necessary antidote.
Institutionally, the two nerve centres of the New Culture Movement became Beijing and Shanghai. In Beijing, the more major of the two, the leading universities tied to the New Youth and NCM activity were Tsinghua University and Peking University (with the latter taking precedence).
Of these, Tsinghua University was created in the wake of the Boxer Rebellion of 1899-1901, which saw the violent attack by traditionalists in northern China on foreigners, Christians, and Westerners, whom they saw as too influential and exploitative. This rebellion ultimately led to the capture of Beijing by an Eight-Nation Alliance (Britain, US, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, Austria-Hungary), who forced upon the Qing a string of indemnities and punishments. These reparations would go on until one Liang Cheng, an alumnus of the Skull & Bones instigated Chinese Educational Mission, negotiated that they be reduced and redirected, with some going into a scholarship programme known as the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship, and the rest going towards the creation of a new, Western-inclined university, which became Tsinghua University.
As for Peking University, this establishment was created in 1898 as China’s first modern, Western modelled national University by an imperial decree of the Guangxu Emperor amid the Hundred Days’ Reform — a mass, nationwide movement between June and September of 1898 to modernise China’s institutions in the wake of the First Sino-Japanese War. The impetus for both the Hundred Days’ Reform and the creation of the University largely came from the Emperor’s main advisor, Kang Youwei, who had been advocating for more Western-oriented reforms since the early 1890s. Youwei’s disciple, Liang Qichao, would also play a big role and would draft the university’s charter.
According to Youwei, he owed his “conversion to this line of (Western-oriented) thinking” chiefly on the writings of two missionaries, the Rev. Timothy Richard and the Rev. Dr Young J. Allen. Allen and Richard, as Welsh and American Baptist missionaries, were active in the publication of Western material targeted at Chinese scholars and elites. To serve this end, they had helped found the Society for the Diffusion of Christian and General Knowledge Among the Chinese (SDK) in 1887, the publications of which helped lay the intellectual groundwork for and supplement the Hundred Days’ Reform.
Of the two men, Timothy Richard — the “most famous Westerner in China” and the first person to mention Marx and Engels’s names in Chinese — would be a particularly influential over Youwei and his apprentice Liang Qichao, meeting them in a 1895 Beijing visit and forming a close relationship, going on to employ Qichao as his personal secretary not long after.
Before founding the SDK, Timothy Richard had risen to prominence in the missionary world through his early career spent in the employ of the Baptist Missionary Society. At the time Timothy joined, 1869, the BMS had recently gone through a mid 19th century expansion, chiefly under the financial patronage and management of the industrialist and civil engineer Samuel Morton Peto (of Nelson’s Column and Houses of Parliament fame). As long-time treasurer of the BMS, it was Peto who facilitated the entry of the administrator Alfred Henry Baynes into the society4 and trained him as a bookkeeper, with Baynes then going on to become general secretary of the organisation and the primary overseer of Timothy Richard.
A Liberal MP under Lord Palmerston’s government, Peto had close business ties to the industrialist Thomas Brassey via their civil engineering partnership, Peto, Brassey, and Betts. Notably, Brassey’s son, Thomas Brassey, 1st Earl Brassey, is listed by Carroll Quigley as having been a member of the Cecil Bloc (the forerunner to the Milner Group) as well as a member of the Society of the Elect (inner circle) of the Rhodes-Milner secret society5. Brassey also had marital ties to key families within the Cecil Bloc, such as the Roseberrys and the Grosvenors — a quality that Samuel Morat Peto himself shared, being matrimonially tied to the Cecil Bloc’s Wyndham family through a son’s marriage. According to Quigley, the two main haunts of the Cecil Bloc were the Grillion’s and The Club — each with about 30-40 members at any one given time. Although the Russells are not directly listed as members of the Cecil Bloc by Quigley, the family had ample representation across both clubs throughout the 19th century.
By the mid 1800s, the Cecil Bloc, foreshadowing their Milner Group offspring, were already active in the promotion of a British imperial federation via their mouthpieces, the Imperial Federation League and the Royal Colonial Society. Brassey was extremely active in the former of these, serving as Treasurer for nearly all its existence. With this in mind, it is probably not without coincidence that one of Timothy Richard’s biggest propositions to the Qing regime — something which he also convinced Kang Youwei of the legitimacy of in a 1898 meeting — was for China to join a federation of ten nations against the “lawless”, consisting of several Western powers and Japan. To accompany this federation, there would also need be a new common perennial religion “based on the best and highest in all of the different faiths”, with it being the case that “The next step in religious evolution is not a monopoly of any one of these competitive religions but a federation of all”.
It was in part the proposition of such ideas as this federation, alongside the growing, Rasputin-like influence of Kang Youwei over the Guangxu Emperor, that led to the Empress Dowager Cixi (the Emperor’s aunt and adoptive mother) and the more conservative elements in the Qing court suppressing the Hundred Days’ Reform and calling for the arrest and execution of Liang Qichao and Kang Youwei. Upon their persecution, it was Timothy Richard who would come to their aid and assist in their safe passage to exile, during which they would both travel and tour, meeting foreign leaders and other notables such as Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and J.P. Morgan.
Following the 1911 Xinhai Revolution, Youwei and Qichao would return to China. Liang Qichao, building upon his time as secretary to Timothy Richard, in which he had immersed himself in the literature of the SDK, would turn to progressive journalism and politics. In 1912, he founded the Democratic Party and appointed the former Qing-era pro-Western constitutional reformer Tang Hualong as chief secretary. Together, these two men would then establish the Progressive Party in 1913, at which time Qichao’s partner Hualong would come into contact with future CCP co-founder Li Dazhao, and, impressed by their interaction, began to serve as his earliest patron and mentor, hiring him as a personal secretary and sponsoring his education in Japan where he was first exposed to Western ideas.
Then, in 1917, it was one of Liang Qichao’s protégés, the Minister of Education Fan Yuanlian, who would invite the progressive Cai Yuanpei - a New Culture Movement proponent and contributor to Chen Duxiu’s New Youth Magazine - to become chancellor of Peking University6. Under Yuanpei, Peking would be transformed into China’s central hub for the New Culture Movement, facilitating the recruitment of many of its key figures, such as Chen Duxiu, Li Dazhao, Hu Shih, Zhang Shizao, Yang Chiangji, and Qian Xuantong, to the faculty.
Likewise, it was due to Yuanpei’s enactment of a policy of “Toleration and inclusion” regarding diverse schools of thought that the door be opened to certain social and philosophical theories which “would otherwise not necessarily (have) survive(d) the political trials of the time” - notably “socialism or Marxism”7.
The Leipzig-Peking Connection
In addition to being installed as chancellor of Peking by a protege of the Cecil Bloc proxy Liang Qichao (who also chartered the university to begin with), we find some interesting ties to Yuanpei himself.
Already having the interesting attribute of an early mentorship under a Jesuit Priest, Ma Xiangbo, who shaped his liberal outlook, a young Yuanpei had then traveled to Germany as part of his journey in absorbing Western thought and culture. Here, Yuanpei spent the years between 1907 and 1911 being heavily influenced as a student of Wilhelm Wundt, the ‘grandfather of psychology’ who established the world’s first psychology laboratory at the University of Leipzig.
In addition to having familial ties to the Bavarian Illuminati via his grandfather (known as ‘Raphael’ within the organisation) Wundt had ties by proxy to central figures of Skull & Bones through another of his protégés; the American psychologist and educator G. Stanley Hall — a man who had his education and career funded and facilitated by leading Bonesmen such as Daniel Coit Gilman and the Tafts8.
It was Wundt, by way of Stanley Hall, who would be used as a conduit by Skull & Bones to import experimental psychology into America. Under the oversight of Bonesman Daniel Coit Gilman at Johns Hopkins, Wundt’s discipline would be Americanised and subsequently merged with Hegelianism - namely, the concept that an individual only possesses true reality through relational contexts within the state, and therefore must be groomed to serve it. The man to do this merging would be Stanley Hall’s own protégé, John Dewey, who would apply it to his educational reforms in order to bring about some of the first major movements towards total collectivism within the U.S. education system.
Being the most significant of the earliest intellectuals to champion the application of psychology and scientific principles to education, Dewey and his ‘progressive’ programme of learning would also help lay the groundwork for other educators to do the same. Such examples come in the form of Edward Thorndike, a man mentored by James McKeen Cattell — another protégé of Wundt. Thorndike would pioneer many key elements which were later central to the rise of behaviourism in the USA, creating a fertile ground for the application of Pavlov and Skinner’s theories to flourish in the realm of education, so that the American youth may be programmed as if they were stimulus-response-based animals9.
All of this to say, with Wundt being the go-to-man to assist Skull & Bones in their bid to transform the education system (and ergo the entire psychology) of the United States, it certainly raises eyebrows that another of his students, Cai Yuanpei, would go on to become chancellor of Peking University and himself play a gargantuan role in history by fostering the intellectual climate where early Marxist sentiments in China bloomed. Such questions are only further raised when one looks at the fact that John Dewey, as Wundt and Skull & Bones’s mutual product, was sanctioned by Yuanpei to come and lecture at Peking University between the summers of 1919 and 1921, during which he would come into contact with Mao Zedong and the early figures surrounding the creation of the CCP.
Deweyan thought and the Cultural Revolution
For much of the New Culture Movement, Peking University underwent a strong wave of American, or, more particularly, Deweyan, pragmatism — partially due to global trends but largely thanks to the efforts of the Western-educated scholars whom Cai Yuanpei employed.
A brief intro into pragmatism as a philosophy is it rejects the idea that truth or objective reality exists in an eternal, fixed manner due to the human condition of being trapped inside a body with limited senses. Therefore, according to the philosophy, an idea only has value or truth insofar as it can be demonstrated and utilised in society; if believing a certain ‘truth’ works practically (in the sense of helping you get good results and live more efficiently), then that is what makes it true. What this ultimately boils down to is ‘truth’ being nothing but a useful tool or map to get you or society to where they need to go (or rather, where establishment-backed social scientists and engineers need them to go).
Given the chaotic, warlordist predicament of China in the late 1910s, Chinese academia was particularly susceptible to such notions as this hands-on, practical philosophy, which could be adopted as a simple solution to rapidly strengthen China. Before Dewey’s visit, he had already gained a somewhat superstar status among the Chinese intellectual elite, and was perceived at the height of the New Culture Movement to be the perfect embodiment of the “Mr Science” and “Mr Democracy’ archetype coined by Chen Duxiu. In this regard, the anticipation for his arrival was not something restricted to the likes of the more liberally inclined thinkers like Hu Shi; even the more far-left students would originally have high hopes.
As one of Dewey’s proteges, the Marxist Sidney Hook pointed out, the connection between Deweyan thought and Marxism is often something overlooked due to the historical connotations of the two; however, there are more similarities than one might regard at first sight. Ideologically, both use Hegel as their starting point, both emphasise philosophy as a tool of change rather than study, both teach that the sum of man is that of a ‘tool-making animal’, and that dualisms in nature are oppressive and class antagonistic10.
Then, there were Dewey’s political beliefs. Possessing just enough liberalism to satiate the Americans while carrying out his collectivist educational reforms, he also held the right amount of socialism to grab the attention of the burgeoning cadre of leftists at Peking. In this regard, he was a harsh critic of laissez-faire capitalism, promoting a socialised economy and industry with economic redistribution. To signify such beliefs, it can be pointed towards that Dewey was good friends with Thomas Lee Davidson, the founder of the precursor to the Fabian Society - the Fellowship of the New Life, and the pair would even go so far as to build cottages and live beside each other for a period11.
Such aspects of Dewey’s character would go down well with some of the central, soon-to-be founders of the CCP, despite their disappointments at his anti-revolutionary, pro-gradual reformist stance to socialism. Chen Duxiu, in particular, was impressed by one of Dewey’s lectures in which he posited that “the economy is the basis of social and political life, and he presented society as a space of struggle between dominated and dominant social groups, referring particularly to the labour movement and the struggles of women”12.
Most pertinently, however, was Dewey’s impact on Mao Zedong during Mao’s own overlapping stay at the university. The 24-year-old Mao Zedong, a quiet outsider to Beijing with a strange provincial accent, arrived at Peking in the Autumn of 1918. Taking up his low-paid librarian job under the tutelage of future CCP co-founder Li Dazhao, Mao would find himself amid the height of the Deweyean-pragmatist, New Culture Movement-encompassed intellectual environment. Over the course of his two visits to the University (Autumn 1918 to mid-1919 and December 1919 to spring 1920), Mao would attend at least some of Dewey’s lectures and become heavily enamoured with his protege Hu Shih’s courses on Pragmatism. Traces of such inspiration can be seen by him, in line with the Deweyan emphasis on education as a primary vehicle for major transformations within society, founding newspapers at the university, with Hu Shih publishing praise-filled comments on his articles13.
That Mao’s basic ideas on education were forged at a time when he adhered to Deweyan pragmatism is significant, being that we find echoes of this in Mao’s writings and policies even after his total shift to Marxism around mid 1920 and subsequent rise to Chairman of the CCP (although he later never mentioned Dewey by name). In his writings, for instance, we find in Mao’s Little Red Book, the icon of his leadership during the Cultural Revolution, an entire chapter (Chapter 23) dedicated to the Deweyan ethos of the necessity of learning through the practical investigation of reality, in which his “No investigation, no right to speak” quote can be found.
Policy-wise, we find Deweyan teachings in the educational reforms of the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76, during which Mao campaigned for the purging of ‘capitalist’, ‘bourgeois’, and ‘traditional’ elements of Chinese society in the wake of the failures of the Great Leap Forward industrialisation campaign. The reforms of this period can be traced directly back in origin to the creation of Mao’s Hunan-based, experimental ‘Self Study University’ of 192114. The manifesto of this Self Study University explicitly “drew on the fundamental themes of Deweyan educational theory: through his emphasis on the role of personal initiative and expression; through critiquing the separation that existed between education and day-to-day concerns; and through highlighting the importance of the relationship between work and education”15. In alignment with this Deweyan ethos, as opposed to being dictated to by a teacher in lectures, study in this university — namely, of canonical communist texts — was to be done independently, with the lessons serving as collective reading sessions and guided discussions. Additionally, with Mao’s criticism of formal, hierarchical, and elitist education, he would require no entry exam and open the doors of the university to all classes and genders.
Looking at the Cultural Revolution, we see similar patterns emerge. Throughout this decade, Mao framed traditional Chinese education as elitist and unequal and closed down colleges and universities, mobilising the Red Guards - a student-led paramilitary movement - to attack teachers and administrators. In their place, he erected new institutions and abolished entrance examinations, creating a new intellectual stratum based on class and political loyalty. The structure of these new classes changed, mirroring the Self Study University with lectures being abandoned and ‘lessons’ consisting of group political study/discussion sessions in which Mao’s writings and other desired Marxist literature replaced broader academic material.
Perhaps most significantly is the way that Mao drew on the Deweyan-inspired, Self-Study University applied principle of “highlighting the importance of the relationship between work and education” with his rural re-education programmes during the Cultural Revolution. In these programmes, tens of millions of urban ‘class enemies’ were sent to labour camps, factories, and villages in the countryside to be ‘reformed’ via their intermingling with the peasant class. While there, inmates performed long hours of gruelling labour to eliminate ‘bourgeois’ thinking, and then participated in political group study sessions, often involving struggle sessions and harsh self-criticism.
Another relevant detail about the Self Study University is that Mao set it up with the personal assistance of Dewey’s protégé, Hu Shih16, the man who had been the main instigator in inviting Dewey to Peking. Some relevant detail on Hu Shih is that he studied in America under the patronage of the Liang Cheng-instigated Boxer Indemnity Scholarship programme, and while in America, he met, eloped with, and maintained lifelong correspondence with Edith Clifford Williams, the daughter of Yale professor Henry Shaler Williams17. Shaler Williams got the job at Yale thanks to his being a protege of James Dwight Dana, a member of the New England Dwight family, which is, like the Russells, deeply intertwined with the university’s legacy. At that time, Yale’s President was also Timothy Dwight V, another member of the Dwight family, and a member of Skull & Bones.
Additionally, the funds which Mao obtained for the start of his Self-Study University were obtained from the profits of his ‘Culture Bookshop’, which he had received space for from the medical college of Yale-in-China, a non-denominational missionary society sanctioned in 1901 by the Skull & Bonesman Yale president Arthur Hadley. This institution had come to Mao’s aid not once, but twice, as when he left Peking destitute after his first visit in 1918-19, Yale-in-China invited him to take over editorship of the journal of their student union, in which he would publish progressive ideas of the New Culture Movement. It was both through the reputation boost which the newspaper editorship provided and through his use of the profits of his Culture Bookshop to finance various socialist youth corps that Mao was thrust into the delegacy at the First Congress of the Chinese Communist Party18.
Enter, Bertrand Russell
Besides the influence of Deweyan theory in the Self Study University, which went on to form central components of the Cultural Revolution, we also find Dewey personally playing a big role in helping to foment another key moment in CCP history — the visit of Bertrand Russell, one of the Russell clan’s own, to Peking University. While lecturing at Peking, “Dewey presented the thought of William James, Henri Bergson and Bertrand Russell as three diverse directions for possible study”19, so that “Just as the hiring of Cai Yuanpei and Chen Duxiu to guide the intellectual life of Peking University would accelerate the new ‘Chinese enlightenment’, Dewey’s lectures would amplify interest in Bertrand Russell”20.
In addition to Dewey, the invitation of Russell to Peking would hinge on several individuals. Firstly, there was the main instigator, the Cecil Bloc proxy Liang Qichao, who would lobby Cai Yuanpei to make the overtures. Secondly, there was the philosopher, Fu Tong, who drafted and sent the formal invitation. Tong had himself been educated at Birmingham University, where he was allegedly co-supervised by Bertrand Russell while writing his thesis21. Third, there was Zhang Shenfu, a mentee of Zhang Shizhao (the man who studied under a protege of a close associate of Russell’s godfather, John Stuart Mill). Shenfu is the student who is supposed to have initially popularised Russell’s works among the progressive milieu at Peking, introducing them to figures such as Cai Yuanpei and Chen Duxiu22. Being the largest supporter of Russell in China, Shenfu was known as “China’s Russell scholar” and even went so far as to proclaim “I worship you” in a letter to Russell23. Additionally, the interpreter on Russell’s trip was Zhao Yuanren, who had been a classmate of the (then future) John Dewey protege Hu Shih at Cornell on the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship.
Russell’s trip coincided with the height of the May 4th Movement — a mass pro-nationalist, anti-imperialist and anti-feudal political reorientation all across China. This movement had been sparked by a nationwide protest on May 4th, 1919, led first by students in Beijing with Peking University as the initiator, in response to the betrayal at the Treaty of Versailles in which former, German-held Chinese territory was transferred to Japan (building on earlier discontentment at Yuan Shikai’s earlier concessions of 1915).
The intellectual leaders of the May 4th Movement were, by and large, the same as the New Culture Movement — the figures who were, at that time, in the orbit of Peking University and the New Youth Magazine. Therefore, it could be said that the New Culture Movement laid the intellectual and ideological foundation of the May 4th Movement, and the May 4th protests served as the turning point which catalysed the encapsulation of the ideas of the New Culture Movement into active politics. Evidence of this can be found in no better place than the two Chen Duxiu-coined pillars of the New Culture Movement, “Mr. Science” and “Mr. Democracy”, becoming the main placard slogans of the May 4th Protests, with the argument being that it was only by embracing these “two gentlemen” as opposed to outdated Confucian tradition that China could escape its degradation.
However, as the May 4th Movement unfolded, there eventually emerged a split between proponents of the New Culture Movement in which said “Mr. Democracy” pillar would be gradually abandoned, along with the philosophies of more liberal leaning figures such as John Dewey, as it was now proposed by some intellectuals, including Duxiu himself, that the Versailles treatment of China displayed a show of the liberal Western powers being unfair, and that Marxism/socialism was the only alternative.
These far-left-leaning intellectuals would form a circle at Peking. Li Dazhou, having been the earliest meaningful proponent of Marxism in China would begin bringing people into the circle, including fellow CCP founders Chen Duxiu and Mao Zedong, the latter of whom Dazhao would tutor and transform into a devout Marxist by 1920/21. Together, these early communists held secret meetings for students in Dazhao’s library office, which was nicknamed ‘the Red Chamber’. As with the New Culture Movement, Chen Dixiu’s New Youth magazine would once again serve as a key propaganda outlet, being turned into the most influential early vehicle for the dissemination of Marxist sentiment in China.
It was in the midst of all of this that Bertrand Russell arrived in October 1920 to begin his world-famous eight-month tour across the country in which he lectured at Peking and Hunan to crowds of thousands on the subject of philosophy and social issues. With Russell coming straight from a trip to Russia to speak to Lenin and Trotsky, and to view the Bolshevik regime in practice, the Chinese Marxists were extra poised to hear what the philosopher had to say about his findings. They also had hopes for Russell — a self-proclaimed socialist — to serve as a counteracting force against the more moderate Deweyan ideations. As one intellectual, Zhang Dongsun, described the atmosphere in Shanghai at this time, “When Dewey arrived in China, Pragmatism filled the air. Now that Russell has arrived, the atmosphere has shifted to Russell’s socialism”24.
However, just as with John Dewey, the Marxist-Leninist crowd once again found disappointment, as Russell would write and lecture critically of the Bolshevik model of dictatorship and violent revolution, disavowing it, so he said, based on what he had seen in Russia regarding suppression of liberty, dogmatic fanaticism, and widespread misery.
As Russell put it, “[Socialism] is necessary to the world”, and “Bolshevism deserves the gratitude and admiration” of progressives for attempting to carry it out. However, it was unlikely that “a stable or desirable form of [Socialism]” could be established using the “rough and dangerous” methods of the Bolsheviks. As if this blow to wasn’t enough, Russell would also deny the possibility of communism in general being possible in China for many years, because communism was “only amenable to industrialised countries”, and China was an agricultural country of peasants.
On this, he stated:
“If, here in China, a government were to decree communism tomorrow, communism would not result from the decree, because there would be resistances and in the habits of the people, and because the material conditions in the way of machinery etc. do not exist. The power of governments is strictly limited to what is technically and psychologically possible at any moment in a given population. For success in social reconstruction, it is vitally necessary, not merely to understand the ethical purposes at which we should aim, but also to know the scientific laws determining what is possible”.
To attain communism required industry, and to attain such industry required capital, Russell said, and seeing as China did not, at that time, have such capital, Russell proposed a programme of education to change the proclivities of the masses and ready them for the transition so they may, in time, develop industry in a non-capitalist manner. As the end product of all this, Russell envisioned a system of non-revolutionary, democratic, decentralised guild socialism as opposed to centralised state communism for China.
Such notions were unsurprisingly met with sharp criticism by the more far-left-leaning members of the May 4th Movement, who poohed at the premise of engaging with and persuading capitalists to join them instead of wrenching their capitalist structures from them by force. Zhou Fohai, a future founding member of the CCP, would write “Ever since Russell arrived to China I’ve been looking forward to discussing socialism … who would have guessed that we’d get the opposite result. Ever since Russell uttered his call to ‘develop industry and revive education’ the discussion has turned against socialism”. Li Dazhao would echo such sentiments in March of 1921, writing “Ever since Russell said that ‘China needs to develop its industry’ everyone has been making a big deal about this need. Indeed, China’s economic misfortune is undeniable and industry needs to develop, but that we must employ capitalism to do this is absurd in the extreme”25.
Mao himself, after visiting one of Russell’s lectures in his home province of Changsha, also proclaimed dissatisfaction:
“In his lecture in Changsha, Russell ... took a position in favour of communism but against the dictatorship of the workers and peasants. He said that one should employ the method of education to change the consciousness of the propertied classes, and that in this way it would be necessary to limit freedom or to have recourse to war and blood revolution ... My objections to Russell’s viewpoint can be stated in a few words: “This is all very well as a theory, but it is unfeasible in practice”26.
However, just with the unsung yet gargantuan impact that Dewey would have on events surrounding the early CCP and future communist China, Russell would himself make major, yet unemphasised contributions. Most relevant here would be his influence over CCP co-founder Chen Duxiu.
Even after his conversion to Marxism, Duxiu had always been suspicious of political structures, claiming instead to prefer as the preparatory tool for revolution the spreading of ideas and recruiting of cadres via loosely allied groups of individuals loyal to a teacher. However, in this regard a “major transformation in Chen’s thinking”27 would occur due to Russell and his lectures. Here, Russell, despite himself being a proponent of a decentralised system of guild socialism, would praise aspects of the Bolshevik organisation for its effectiveness in seizing and holding power, in addition to being critical of the sentiments among anarchists and some socialist cirlcles that the masses could organise themselves spontaneously. These orations would help highlight to Chen the practical advantages of a rigid organisational structure as opposed to diffuse intellectual circles, which would play a big role in crystallising his shift towards Leninist principles of a tightly organised party, and inspire him to push for a new political structure to enact change28.
Following this shift, and with the financing of the Russian Comintern, Chen would serve as the key driver in unifying the various scattered Chinese communist cells in into a centralised, disciplined national structure, drafting provisional rules, establishing Shanghai as the central hub and emphasising central controls around it, all of which culminated in the creation of the Chinese Communist Party in July of 1921.
Russell pivots, supports a Bolshevik-style takeover of China
On the eve of the creation of the CCP, Russell’s influence would once again raise its head. In his farewell speech titled ‘China’s Road to Freedom’, he would completely walk back everything he had vehemently been emphasising on his tour, stating that the predicament of China’s placid, agricultural society was so dire that only a strong state, as opposed to decentralised guilds, would suffice as a means to bring about socialism. Mass education and industry were still needed, he said, but would only be possible under a centralised government to ensure direction and prevent corruption. Such liberal and democratic forms of socialism as guild socialism, he decided, could only work in countries like Britain, in which there were educated and informed voters.
Likewise, while he had spent the last few months harshly criticising the Bolshevik model of revolution for its violence and oppression, he would now fully endorse it as the only means available to save China, stating that:
“Political reform in China cannot for many years to come take the form of democracy after the Western model. Democracy presupposes a population that can read and write and that has some degree of knowledge as to political affairs. These conditions cannot be satisfied in China until at least a generation after the establishment of a government devoted to the public welfare. You will have to pass through a stage analogous to that of the dictatorship of the communist party in Russia, because it is only by some such means that the necessary education of the people can be carried through, and the non-capitalistic development of industry effected”.
This dictatorship, said Russell, would require:
“Ten thousand resolute men, inspired by an ideal and willing to risk their lives, could acquire control of the government, regenerate Chinese institutions, and institute an industrial development which should be free from the evils associated with capitalism in the West”.
Russell’s farewell speech provided external, authoritative intellectual backing to the pre-CCP Marxists just weeks before the founding of the CCP, with the likes of Chen Duxiu being able to bolster rhetoric by highlighting that an elite vanguard-led Bolshevik-style revolution was now something that even prominent Western thinkers now saw as an inevitability. In the New Youth Magazine issue of that month, Duxiu would quote Russell’s speech extensively, taking the call for 10,000 men as a “Very significant hint”29 in justifying and legitimising a small, dedicated political party to seize and reform the state apparatus of China. In Chen’s view, such a party was something that had to precede the government, as opposed to the other way around, with it being the case that “The Party is the mother of government, government is the child of the Party; rather than cry out ‘reform the government’, we should cry out ‘reform the Party’!”30
So, an elite-led vanguard party is what was needed to mobilise the government, in order that the government then mobilise the people. Russell’s lack of faith in the uneducated and unpatriotic Chinese to do such a thing on their own is also something that Chen would agree on, with him highlighting that “The Chinese people are simply a pile of loose sand … a bunch of narrow individualists with no public spirit”. The best way to deal with this loose sand, he said, would be to “first let Lenin kill us, and then we’ll kill Lenin”31, meaning to violently seize control of Chinese government and industry, and once this is done, turn control back over to the people (or not).
Recap
With everything in mind, we still only have a fraction of the full story; what we will never be able to see are the private affairs of Russell, Dewey, the CCP founders, or any potential shadowy figures surrounding these characters during this period. Having a lack of insight into the true level of interaction between all of these characters, what instructions or orders may have been passed off outside of the (carefully managed) public record, one can only take the measly breadcrumbs that lie exterior to the mainstream trail, and make conclusions based on what they indicate.
In this case, what we have been able to determine is that:
The Russell family’s Skull & Bones-sponsored Chinese missionary work and educational programmes assisted in putting Yuan Shikai into power, with Yuan Shikai then creating the conditions for the New Culture Movement to arise with his foreign policy and political reforms.
The seeds of the New Culture Movement can be traced back to a magazine founded by an Aberdeen University scholar, Zhang Shizhao, who was taught by a protégé of a man closely connected to John Stuart Mill, Bertrand Russell’s godfather.
This magazine would play a pivotal role in the career of future CCP co-founder Chen Duxiu, who would go on to spearhead the NCM through his New Youth magazine.
Cecil Bloc proxy Timothy Richard mentored Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, who, between them, founded Peking University - the future New Culture Movement, May 4th hotspot from which early Marxism and the CCP emerge.
Liang Qichao’s Progressive Party co-founder Tang Hualong helped the rise to prominence of future CCP co-founder Li Dazhao.
Liang Qichao’s protege, Fan Yuanlian, installed Cai Yuanpei, a student of the Skull & Bones conduit William Wundt, as chancellor of Peking University.
Yuanpei proceeded to bring in Western-educated and New Culture Movement-affiliated intellectuals as faculty, including the future co-founders of the CCP, among them being Mao Zedong’s communist educator Li Dazhao.
Yuanpei enacted a policy of philosophical and ideological tolerance at Peking, which allowed early Chinese Marxism to flourish.
John Dewey, another product of Wundt and Skull & Bones via the psychologist G. Stanley Hall, was invited to Peking University by Hu Shih, one of Dewey’s own proteges who studied under him on a Boxer Indemnity Scholarship (with this Scholarship itself having been founded by an alumnus of the Skull & Bones-created Chinese Educational Mission).
Mao attended Dewey’s lectures and founded the Self-Study University of 1921 based on Deweyan principles, with the help of Hu Shih and with money raised through Yale-in-China’s assistance. This university acted as a test run for major policies later implemented in the Cultural Revolution.
Dewey helped spread the philsophy of Bertrand Russell, aiding in his invitation to the University, along with the efforts of Li Qichao, Fu Tong (an old associate from Birmingham University), and Zhang Shenfu (a protégé of Zhang Shizao), with Zhao Yuanren (an old classmate of Dewey’s protege Hu Shih) acting as translator.
On his trip, Russell proceeded to make critical changes in the outlook of Chen Duxiu and provided intellectual reinforcement for the creation of a vanguard party to rise and seize control of the Chinese government and industry, weeks before the founding of the CCP.
What all of this would seem to indicate, at least in the mind of the author, is the unfolding of a long-term agenda, largely connected to one family, which would eventually result in the creation of the Chinese Communist Party and a near-unparalleled amount of death and suffering in any one location in such a short time period.
But what of the perpetrator?
Mao Zedong - dictator or puppet?
One thing we have not yet discussed is the early background of Mao. After bouncing around from failed starts in a police academy, a soap-production school, and an economics school, Mao would enrol at the Fourth Normal School of Hunan at 20 years old in an attempt to become a teacher. At this school, he was mentored, or “moulded”32, by a professor named Yang Chiangji, who would later become the father-in-law of Mao’s first marriage. Chiangji was the man who would introduce Mao to Western learning, as well as to the New Youth magazine of Chen Duxiu, with whom Chiangji was friends. Following this introduction, Mao would contribute to the magazine in 1917, gaining him his first bit of recognition and helping him get his foot in the door to network among the milieu surrounding the New Culture Movement.
It was also Chiangji who secured Mao’s position as librarian at Peking, where he was mentored in Marxism by Li Dazhao, marking the beginning of his long communist career. In this, Chiangji had himself been able to secure Mao the job thanks to his own recommendation to the Peking faculty by the Tiger Magazine owner and Mao-money-lender Zhang Shizao, a close friend of Chiangji since their studies at the University of Aberdeen.33 This last fact is absolutely crucial, as, of these two good friends who both met contemporarily at Aberdeen, we have Chiangji going on to mentor Mao Zedong and bring him to Peking University, and Zhang Shizhao going on to help launch the career of the future CCP co-founder Chen Duxiu at the Tiger Magazine.
Moreover, is that at Aberdeen, both of these men shared the same teacher, the aforementioned William Leslie Davidson34. As already stated, Davidson had himself been a protege of the Lord Rector of the university, Alexander Bain, a close associate of John Stuart Mill, the godfather of a young Bertrand Russell. That is, the same member of the Russell clan who would grow up to become a philosopher and tour China, playing a pivotal role in inspiring Chen Duxiu to organise the creation of the CCP.
Discarding whatever seemingly minute probability that coincidence is what caused all these things to line up so perfectly, what this would indicate is that from at least the 1860s (the decade when Alexander Bain was close with Stuart Mill, and had William Leslie Davidson under his tutelage), the historical template for the creation of communist China, along with all of the characters to bring it in, was in place. From there, all that was left to do was to find the right candidates to fit the roles, which is where Yang Chiangji and Zhang Shizhao came in to serve as scouts (or at least formed key early stations in a grooming conveyor belt).
This, then, brings us to our next subject - now that we know that Mao Zedong, Chen Duxiu, Li Dazhao, and the creation of the CCP were tied to such entities as the Russell family, Skull & Bones, and the Cecil Bloc (Rhodes-Milner), what of their opponents, Chiang Kai-Shek and the KMT?
KMT, CCP - two wings of the same bird
It turns out that besides being a protege of Yat-sen, who was himself a creation of the British establishment (namely, the Order of Saint John of Jerusalem and a cadre of elites descended from the Bruce dynasty and their allies), we also find some other very interesting connections to the rise of Chiang Kai-Shek; and much more directly than that of the CCP founders. Most relevant here is both Chiang and Sun’s marriage into the decorated, US-affiliated Soong family.
The Soong family began with Charlie Soong, who at age 17 moved to Boston under the adoption of a maternal relative, where he would convert to Christianity and, through the help of the Methodist network in Wilmington, be enrolled at Trinity College in 1880 as its first international student. Lacking funds, the Methodist industrialist and tobacco businessman Julian S. Carr, one of the wealthiest men in the South, stepped in to sponsor Soong’s education, going so far as to personally taking him into his home and treat him as if he were a son.
It was Carr who provided Soong with funds to start his own publishing business in Shanghai, helping him accumulate his initial wealth. While in Shanghai, Soong would meet and become friends with Sun Yat-sen, bonding over their shared membership in the Heaven and Earth Society. Both Carr and Soong would proceed to play key financial roles in supporting Sun during his exile in the years leading up to the 1911 Xinhai Revolution. Carr, by the way, traced his lineage back to the Garter Knight Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset — father-in-law to William Russell, 5th Duke of Bedford — a 17th-century member of the Russell clan.
During these years, Soong began a family in Shanghai with his wife Ni Kwei-tseng, resulting in three daughters and three sons, all of whom would be sent to the United States for education. Of the daughters, together known as the legendary “Soong Sisters”, Soong Ching-ling would marry Sun Yat-sen in 1915, Soong Mei-ling would marry Chiang Kai-Shek in 1927, while Soong Ai-ling married H.H. Hung, the richest man in the early Republic of China, in 1914.
Of these, Chiang Kai-Shek’s wife, Soong Mei-ling, was educated at Wellesley College, where she was a classmate of Beth Luce Moore, the sister of Skull & Bonesman Henry Luce of Time, Life, Fortune, and Sports Illustrated magazine fame35. Their contact would facilitate a later meeting between Mei-ling’s brother, T.V. Soong, in which Luce promised to support the Nationalist government. Following this, Time would begin running a heavy amount of pro-Chiang propaganda, featuring Chiang and Soong Mei-ling on multiple covers, and labelling them “man and wife of the year” in 1937.
In essence, this means that the Russell family’s Skull & Bones participated on the side of Chiang Kai-shek in the Chinese Civil War, while also giving rise to their opponents, the CCP, through all the aforementioned channels. Such two-sided connections further emerge when we consider that several of Luce’s family and social milieu consisted of leading figures within the Pilgrims Society. That is, the Pilgrims Society which was inextricably linked via the Rockefeller Foundation to the funding of the same Institute of Pacific Relations, that, as incessantly emphasised by the McCarthyites and John Birchers, had no shortage of connections to the Chinese communist regime during the Chinese Civil War.
By far the most significant example to highlight in this regard is the doings of the IMF and World Bank architect Harry Dexter White — a man closely connected to the IPR36 — and his protégé, Frank Coe. Together, these Treasury Officials, along with another collaborator, Solomon Adler, acted to obstruct the delivery of a loan of $200 million in gold to the Chinese Nationalist government, leading to the failure of its currency and a hyperinflation that, in no small part, contributed to the setting up of the CCP as the victors of the civil war37.
After scrutiny for their communist ties (namely their participation in the Silvermaster spy ring, one of the most publicised US-Soviet espionage networks of the Cold War), Adler and Coe would then exile themselves from the US and eventually permanently settle in the People’s Republic of China. There, they would secure high-level positions and connections within the CCP, contributing to economic, translation, propaganda, and intelligence work, with Coe in particular assisting with Mao’s Great Leap Forward.
Looking further into the Pilgrims/Milner Group nexus from which the IPR emerged, we find that of the three Soong brothers, T.V. Soong was also an associate of future EU founding father and Le Cercle participant Jean Monnet. Together, they established the China Finance Development Corporation, an investment company involved in investing in Chinese infrastructure for the Nationalist regime (particularly railways). Therefore, we have the proxy connection of the Milner Group both to the Nationalists and, via the missionary Timothy Richard and his mentee Liang Qichao’s Progressive Party, to the aiding in the career of CCP co-founder Li Dazhao.
Final thoughts
In exposés of the true forces behind the history of 19th and 20th-century China, it seems that no matter where one turns, the discussion is hijacked by partial truths and limited hangouts. Those in the vein of the John Bircher crowd will loudly proclaim the connection of the Institute of Pacific Relations to the Chinese communists, all the while failing to highlight that the same actors who were backing their favoured Chiang Kai-shek were also the backers of the IPR. Likewise, the likes of Lyndon LaRouche will go into fantastic detail within texts such as Dope Inc. as to the connection of the Order of Saint John of Jerusalem to the opium plaguing of China throughout the 1800s and the subsequent nexus of drug trafficking organised crime that emerged from it, only to then run propaganda for Yat-sen, despite him being a creation of that same Order of Saint John. What we have attempted to do here is at least somewhat cut through the propaganda and provide some clarity regarding who those forces were, and just how much of a carefully managed affair the Chinese Civil War really was.
This, by the way, is without even going into Japanese post-Meiji Restoration history, being that it was this country’s agitation that led to the growth of Chinese communism to its 1949 level via the KMT and CCP’s Second United Front. Such a discussion would include many of the same players we have been discussing thus far (Pilgrims, Rhodes-Milner, Jardine Matheson, for example), in addition to separate elements like the ever mysterious Black Dragon Society. Unfortunately, all of this is beyond the scope of the article.
To surmise, with the likes of Anthony Sutton already having covered the Skull & Bones prevalence in setting up China for its opening to US corporatism in the 1970s, this piece was intended to show that this was not just capitalist opportunism, but part of an agenda that goes back much further (further, even than the 1911 Xinhai Revolution, which Sutton also correctly points out the Yale connection to).
In this regard, it is the opinion of the author that the communist reign of Mao Zedong was but a business phase in a long-term plan, with Mao’s purpose being to enact nothing short of a mass cultural erasure project to sever China’s connection to its old world. This project, once carried out, made China ripe for the setup as a powerhouse on the global stage and to become the ringleader in today’s dialectic of BRICS vs the Liberal International Order. A dialectic which, if it is carried out in full, ultimately ends in a London-funded Belt and Road Initiative38 building a global smart city prison grid from the rubble.
History of Middlesex county, Connecticut, with biographical sketches of its prominent men - J.B. Beers (page 169)
Logic, ‘Logic,’ ‘Luoji,’ and 邏輯: Zhang Shizhao and the Translation of ‘Logic’ into Chinese in: Journal of Chinese Philosophy Volume 50 Issue 3 (2023)
Alexander Bain | Scottish Philosopher - Institute for the Study of Scottish Philosophy
The Century Volume of the Baptist Missionary Society, 1792 - 1892 (page 51)
The Anglo-American Establishment - Carroll Quigley
Awakening New Youth - Tianjin Equipment Research Institute
Bertrand Russell’s visit to China: Selected texts on the century of intercultural dialogues in logic and epistemology - Edited by Jan Vrhovski and Jana S. Rosker (page 25)
America’s secret establishment: an introduction to the Order of Skull & Bones - Anthony C. Sutton (Memorandum Number four: The Leipzig Connection)
The Underground History of American Education - John Taylor Gatto
Dewey, Hook, and Mao: on some affinities between Marxism and pragmatism - Emmanuel Renault
The St. Louis Hegalians and the Institutionalization of Democratic Education - Joe Ervin, David Beisecker, Jasmin Ozel (page 49)
Renault
Renault
Maoist ideology and education - W. John Morgan (page 45)
Renault
Renault
Hu Shi in Love - US History Scene - Niuniu Teo
Yale Daily New, Vol. 93, No. 96, February 20, 1972 - ‘Yale Group Spurs Mao’s Emergence’ -
Bertrand Russell and China During and After His Vistit in 1920 - John Paisley (page 26)
Ibid
Vrhovski and S. Rosker (page 28)
Ibid (page 27)
Ibid (page 139)
Paisley (page 39)
Ibid (several quotes)
A Case Study in Forecasting: Bertrand Russell’s The Problem of China — Atlantic Forum - Onur Anamur
Chen Duxiu, Founder of the Chinese Communist Party - Lee Feigon (page 148)
(Ibid)
Paisley
Ibid
Ibid
The Man Who Molded Mao: Yang Chiangji amd the First Generation of Chinese Communists
A Journey Between East and West: Yang Chiangji (1871-1920) and his thought
Ibid
Soong Mayling’s 1943 American Speech Tour: A Study in the Rhetoric of Public Diplomacy - Yang Ling (page 47)
The Milner-Fabian Conspiracy - Ioan Ratiu (page 208/209)
DIARIES SAY WHITE FOUGHT CHINA LOAN - New York Times
EU-China Economic Relations to 2025: Building a Common Future - Chatham House, Bruegel, China Center for International Economic Exchanges, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
WOW it is rare to find actual history so well described!
The British services developed and aided the communist Bolsheviks in Russia, I have suspected similar in China but didn't know where to start research. Fascinating 👍
Excellent article - this genealogy is what people need to have a much better understanding of, rather than circling the dialectic drain of ideology. To get beyond that to the architecture and lineage presented. Very glad after 5 yrs of pointing to the Mao, Dewey, Russell, Hook relationships and no public interest at all - I do hope people study this article in detail. Thank you Darren.