Red Genesis: The Hunan First Normal School and the Creation of Chinese Communism, 1903-1921

摘要

To write the biography of a school is to discuss its birth, adolescence and maturation, and the factors that helped determine its fate. Liyan Liu has written a biography of the Hunan First Normal School, at least through the 1910s. However, she has another target, as her title indicates: to trace the connection between what went on in this particular school and the high number of founders of the Communist Party that it produced. The most famous of these was of course Mao Zedong, but Liu points to several others as well. Of these others, Cai Hesen stands out, and Liu offers the most thorough discussion of his turn to Marxism in English that I know of. However, without a full-scale prosopographical analysis, it is not clear exactly how many early CCP members came from First Normal or whether other schools may have produced a similar share.