Savior of the East: Chinese Imaginations of Soviet Russia during the National Revolution, 1925-1927

China's National Revolution was marked by an internationalist outlook. This essay argues that it was symbolic capital associated with the Soviet Union that gave the National Revolution its cosmopolitan tenor. Engaging articles in political, commercial, and student journals published during the mid-1920s, I reveal that the appeal of the Soviet Union rested on its perceived role as "savior of the East," offering to China the chance to enter the world on its own terms. Inspired by the October Revolution, Chinese thinkers rejected the dominant East-West binary, which had explained China's laggard status from a social Darwinist perspective, and embraced an imperialist/oppressed dichotomy, in which "oppressed" implied moral worth and gave Chinese the wherewithal to form conceptual links with groups across national and racial borders. Chinese engagement with Leninism was particularly novel, producing a form of internationalist nationalism that stressed sovereignty and global engagement.