Post WWI Chinese Revolutionary Leaders in Europe

This article is an exploration of a leadership network of 133 Chinese revolutionary leaders who were trained in Western Europe and the Soviet Union during the 1920s. These leaders are in a dataset called Soviet Returned Leaders (SRL). The article utilizes quantitative, geospatial, and network analytical methods as well as proposing two approaches to expand network visualization utility and understanding. The results demonstrate that there are two groups within the SRL, namely those who went to both Western Europe and the Soviet Union (the Euro-Soviet Group) and those who went solely to the Soviet Union (the Soviet Group). The new network dissection techniques and network graphs reveal the importance of both well-known and relatively unknown individuals who may be potentially influential actors indicating that this initial historical network approach to biographical data affords an additional means of studying these important historical individuals.