Clergy as Revolutionaries

Recently, I read Edward Dreyer's history of wars in China during the first half of the twentieth century, China at War: 1901-1949 (London: Longman, 1995). Unless you have a particular interest in, and background knowledge of, those wars I do not recommend that you make the effort to read this specialist volume. What drew my attention to the book was that my father had served in the U.S. Navy in China during WWII, assigned as the personnel officer of a then highly secret unit—the Sino American Cooperative Organization. That unit received only one oblique reference, and then by another name that I recognized only because I was familiar with unit's the history.

One of Dreyer's paragraphs, unrelated to WWII, did catch my attention. In the late 1920s, Sun Yat-sen had independently evolved many of the features of Leninist party organization (a small corps of professional revolutionaries supported by a larger body of dues-paying members, all obeying the party leader through a cellular organization). Communism used the same structure to serve an entirely different theory of history—whose pretensions to scientific status were taken more seriously than they would be today—according to which a Chinese Communist Party might be considered premature. (pp. 120-121)