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Red at Heart: How Chinese Communists Fell in Love with the Russian Revolution. By Elizabeth McGuire. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. viii, 462 pp. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. $34.95, hard bound.
During the first half of the twentieth century, many young Chinese fell in love with communism, the idea of a Communist Party, and the development experience of the Soviet Union. Having been born into a generation where all that had been known was no longer true and the future of China—even the survival of the nation—seemed to be in doubt, the Russian revolution had these young people at the first hello. Then they built a movement around the ideas they had fallen in love with. The attraction of communism was that it combined European modernity and social justice; it promised to make China mighty as well as just. Moreover, they, the young Chinese, could get to be the saviors of their country through the power of their ideas.
As soon as Chinese and Russians started to interact more, it was of course not just ideas that these young people fell in love with. In this deeply researched and exquisitely written book, Elizabeth McGuire shows how people from the two countries fell in and out of love with each other from the 1920s up to the 1960s, and how their encounters, affairs, partnerships, and marriages became a substantial but often overlooked form of Sino-Soviet relations. Thousands of Chinese studied in the Soviet Union and large numbers of Soviet people served in China as engineers, military instructors, or political and administrative advisers. In spite of Communist Party and government attempts at controlling, regulating, or entirely prohibiting romantic involvements, young people did what they always do: skirting restrictions, they learn from each other and carve out space that is theirs alone, their time to love, enjoy, and sing. Even in the depths of Stalinism, it could not be otherwise.
And so began a set of associations that would change China (and to a lesser extent Russia), forever. One of the major strengths of this...