West Across the Pacific: American Involvement in East Asia from 1 ...

Conroy, in telling this story, does not (to use a twenty-first-century expression) “other” the Bolsheviks, just as he has declined to other the Japanese. Each group emerges as it finds its voice. In his narrative, the spokespersons for the workers and peasants belong to yet another previously marginalized group that needs to be brought into the foreground. What various anticommunist officials called the Bolshevik camp was complex and fluid, he explains. It included Sun Yat-sen himself, Soviet advisors to the Kuomintang party, and Mao Tse-tung, the former assistant to librarian Li Tao-chao of Peking University who had recently organized peasant groups in Hunan Province. Conroy quotes at length not any of the aforementioned, but instead Vera Vladimirovna, a “warm and enthusiastic” twenty-year-old student from Far Eastern State University in Vladivostok, who treated “the Soviet and Chinese comrades as people rather than as a ‘sinister influence’ or a ‘Red infection.’?” He traces her leftist views to her repugnance for the custom of binding women’s feet, her sympathy for rickshaw men, and her embrace of the progressive student movement. Vladimirovna notes how British and American ministers stayed “calmly in the wings” and did nothing when the tide suddenly turned and progressive students and teachers, including Li Ta-chao, were arrested and killed. Conroy writes, “Looking back, let us ask, what if the Powers had worried less about Solvency and Bolshevism, regarded the Bolshevik ‘conspirators’ merely as bright (and attractive) young people trying to help China out of these tentacles, and begun to deal with the Wuhan government before the break with Chiang K’ai-shek?”

Part of Conroy’s career-long argument holds that the simplistic vilification of the communist movement as an evil was inconsistent and counterproductive—inconsistent because the U.S. enemy, Japan, was motivated by a similar anticommunism.¹³ It was counterproductive because an in-between world might have been possible, based on negotiation, trade, and rethinking the United States’ own commitment to equality.