A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
MIKHATL BORODIN had an excellent sense of humour and may, in the wry, Russian way, have appreciated the irony of his fate (Mr. Harrison Salisbury, lately the Moscow Correspondent of the New York Times, has revealed that he died- last year, at the age of 68. in a Siberian concentration camp). To say that Borodin was the architect of Chinese Communism is to over-simplify as well as to exaggerate; but he was the ablest and most influ- ential of the small party of advisers—there were never more than forty—dispatched to Canton by the Soviet Government thirty years ago, after Great Britain and America had, not very perspicuously. turned down Sun Yat-sen's appeal for foreign assistance in his struggle to eliminate the war lords and unify China. It was Borodin who introduced to the Chinese revolutionaries the idea that ' the Party ' must permeate and control the army and everything else; and although the party in question was the Kuomintang, and Chiang Kai-shek was the the man who led its victorious armies north to Hankow, Borodin (who accompanied him) sowed the seeds from which the present political system in China was to grow. Once established in control of South China, Chiang Kai-shek turned against the Communists; many were executed, but a hard core, led by Mao Tse-tung and Chu Teh, took refuge in the jagged little mountains round Juichin in Kiangsi. From this fitfully beleaguered enclave they were one day to make themselves masters of the whole country.
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