China

2. Two Chiangs on the skids

The fall of Tsinan, capital of Shantung Province in Northern China, brings to a head the military crisis of the Kuomintang government of Chiang Kai-shek. Economic gloom deepens into chronic disaster. Production continues to decline while the rapacious KMT bureaucracy continues to suck the lifeblood out of trade and industry. Meanwhile the $400 million American aid is dissipated in desperate measures to keep the country going. $125 million goes to direct military purposes but this is hardly a trickle. It is not certain whether the venal “court” around Chiang has given him this picture in toto...

3. The “secret” of Communist success

A disaster of tremendous importance overwhelmed China with the fall of Mukden. All Manchuria, with its million square miles and 40 million population, is now in Stalinist hands. The rout of Kuomintang armies is complete in the North. Whole army corps surrendered, tens of thousands joined the Stalinist armies and the number of dead, wounded and lost runs into the hundreds. The fall of Manchuria dramatises the shift in power to the Chinese Communist Party. The Kuomintang is proved completely incapable of defending its own territories and its own rule; the fortunes of the Kuomintang are at a...

4. Blind alley in Nanking

The armies of Chinese Stalinism are advancing on the Kuomintang capital at Nanking. The extent of social disintegration of the Kuomintang is even more rapid than the advance of the Communist Party armies and this factor alters the picture. Even the bailiwick of T V Soong in Canton, which seemed so secure a few months ago, is no longer immune to the national tendencies. Of the hated Four Families who rule and plunder Nationalist China, T V Soong is perhaps the most favoured by America. In his direction of ECA in China, Roger Lapham distributed the bulk of it to South China, mainly in Kwangtung...

5. The rats begin to desert

The last few weeks have seen the political initiative in China fall to the Communists, on the heels of their military victories. Many groups which waited, before committing themselves to hear Chiang Kai-shek’s New Year’s Day message now feel released from any loyalty to his disintegrating state and have gone over to defeatism or are making overtures to the Stalinists. The death-throes of the Kuomintang will find few sympathisers as all who possibly can do so with safety are joining the scramble to disassociate themselves from the regime and jump on the new bandwagon. The Stalinists are forming...

6. The Communists confront the cities

Stalinist armies continued to mop up in North China with great strides this past week as Central Government troops pulled back to the Yangtze River as the next defence line. The biggest gains for the CP were in the easy and bloodless conquest of Tientsin and Tangku, its port. Only Peiping still stands, but it is only a matter of time before it too surrenders. The most interesting aspect of these otherwise clearly foreshadowed military events is that the leadership of the “peace movements” in all of these Northern cities which are completely surrounded by Stalinist armies and have been for...

7. Revolution in a straitjacket

The great metropolises of China, its modern centres of Shanghai, Nanking and Hankow, are about to fall to Stalinist armies. It is now clear that there will be no real, genuine, stable peace until the Stalinists have completed the conquest of all China north of the Yangtse from its estuary on the China Sea to the great Szchechuan plain in the west, one of the most fertile and richest areas. The problem of the CP is how to achieve hegemony over the rest of China from this continental boundary in the most economical, speedy and politically satisfactory fashion. For this objective, military...

8. Mao and neo-Stalinism: the path of the Chinese CP

Are the Chinese Stalinists different? The very question is one of the more cruel hoaxes of our time, yet many people honestly believe that somehow the CP of China is not like other Stalinist parties. We are not referring here to the economic or political programme of the Chinese CP, but only to its internal regime, to its attitude toward factions, relationship between members and leaders, freedom of internal expression — those organisational characteristics which determine whether or not a party is democratic, whether it sets its own policies or is subservient to alien powers. Thus Harold...

9. Peking versus Moscow: the case of Anna Louise Strong, part 1

The Moscow dispatch announcing that Anna Louise Strong had been placed under arrest as a spy startled all observers of Stalinist political life. In its terse announcement Tass reported that: “Mrs. Strong is accused of espionage and subversive activity directed against the Soviet Union.” She is described as “the notorious intelligence agent.” It is indicated that she will be expelled shortly from Russia. Another amazing phrase of the dispatch declares that she made her way into the USSR “only through negligence of certain foreign relations officials.” Since her “notoriety” as a spy, and...

10. Whose spy is who? The Anna Louise Strong case, part 2

At this writing there remain a few additional observations to be made, but no serious modification of the original idea seems necessary on the basis of events of the past week. The explanation of the Strong incident which seems to cover most of the known facts is that her arrest as a spy by the Russian police is an incident in the silent struggle between Russian imperialist objectives in China and the needs of the Chinese Communist Party. There have long been indications of difficulties between the two. The Strong incident is the first public declaration by Moscow of its determination and a...

11. What is Chinese Stalinism? Notes on the new state party

Throughout Asia the post-war period has been one of vast social upheaval. What happened in Europe after the First World War is now happening in Asia after the second. Without the organising technology of modern society which links together great areas and peoples and without extensive industry which creates a more homogeneous and substantial working class, Asia’s revolutions have taken varied forms. In no case have these changes been organised by a socialist revolutionary party basing itself on the workers. Leadership has fallen to national bourgeois classes, social democrats (Burma) or to...

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