New Youth, journal of the Chinese revolutionary youth movement after the First World War, helped found the original, pre-Stalinist, revolutionary Chinese Communist Party
• This is taken from a longer article about Chinese history and class struggle, 'China and independent working-class politics', published in 2001
How did the independent working class movement develop?
China in 1919 was ripe for revolution. For two thousand years it was ruled by successive dynasties organised around a state bureaucracy. Still overwhelmingly a peasant country, it had stagnated for centuries until its last emperor, the five year old Pu Yi, was displaced and a republic created in 1911. After 1840 China suffered the indignity of ceding tracts of land such as Hong Kong to the European powers as “foreign concessions”, and having opium foisted on its population, so that the British could better procure their tea. Imperial domination was summed up by the sign in the Shanghai municipal park which read, “No dogs or Chinese allowed”.
The European overlords brought with them the misery of capitalist development. The process of industrialisation was heralded by the spread of modern rice processing factories and by the cotton mills. The working class grew rapidly — from 650,000 in 1915 to 1.5 million in the early 1920s. It was concentrated in the major cities: for example, in Shanghai in 1923, 57 factories employed between 500 and 1000 workers and another 49 employed over 1000 workers. Nevertheless the working class remained a small minority in the country as a whole. Its conditions of work were barbaric. As one observer described it:
“Some of the match factories and carpet factories, the ceramics and glass works, and the old-style silk and cotton factories could well have served an inspiration for even Dante’s description of the infernal regions. Pale, sickly creatures move around there in almost total darkness, amidst indescribable filth, and breathing an atmosphere that is insupportable to anyone coming in from outside. At ten o’clock at night, or sometimes even later, they are still at work, and the feeble light of a few oil lamps lends the factories a still more sinister aspect. A few breaks are taken to snatch some food while still at work, or to eat a meal in a courtyard covered with excrement and filth of all kinds. When the time to stop work finally comes, these miserable creatures doss down in any place they can find — the lucky ones on bales of waste material or in the attics if there are any, and the rest on the workshop floor, like chained dogs.” (Chesneaux, 1968: 86).
The revolution of 1911 had briefly brought Sun Yat-sen, leader of the Guomindang (Nationalist Party) to the presidency, but he was deposed by warlords and China carved up still further by civil war. However this ferment found an echo within a layer of intellectuals, who looked to western ideas such as science and democracy as the answer to China’s problems. Most prominent was the May Fourth Movement, a kind of Chinese Enlightenment, which was sparked off by student demonstrations in Beijing in 1919 against the decision to transfer Germany’s concessionary rights to Japan at the Paris Peace Conference. New periodicals sprouted up, the best being New Youth, edited by Chen Duxiu, then professor at Beijing University.
Out of this upsurge developed a labour movement, and a vanguard party. Inspired by the Russian revolution, small study circles of intellectuals, including socialists, anarchists and university teachers, came together to form the new organisation. In September 1920, New Youth became a communist paper, and The Communist was launched as an educational journal. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was founded in July 1921; Chen Duxiu was elected General Secretary, and Henk Sneevliet (Maring) represented the Communist International (Comintern). Although it is true that in its early years the CCP was financed almost entirely by the Comintern, it was not an artificial creation. Rather the existing movement was redirected towards forming a new party. (Saich, 1991: 61-62), (Dirlik, 1989: 193-195).
What could the CCP do? The communists helped to build the trade unions, modelled on the Shanghai Mechanical Workers Union, which they had established in 1920, and militants inspired a strike against the British-American Tobacco company in Shanghai in 1921. However there remained the burning questions of China’s situation — the absence of a democratic republic, the weight of imperial oppression, and the necessity of land reform. In 1920 Lenin counselled that, “The Communist International must enter into a temporary alliance with the bourgeois democracy in the colonial and backward countries, but should not merge with it, and should under all circumstances uphold the independence of the proletarian movement, even if it is in its most embryonic form.” (1966: 149-150).
Where was this bourgeois-nationalist movement in China? Sneevliet put his faith with the Guomindang, characterising it as an amalgam of four different groups — the intelligentsia, emigrants, soldiers and workers, and therefore argued that the CCP should join it without becoming completely submerged. The Guomindang had been central to the Hong Kong seamen’s strike in January-March 1922, in which 120,000 workers came out, winning a great victory. According to Sneevliet it had led the strike and recruited hundreds of militants, whereas the CCP had done very little. (Saich, 1991: 100, 106). Sun Yat-sen would only allow Chinese communists to join as individual members, but the new tactic was pushed through in August 1922. The CCP had just 123 members. Its leadership, including Chen Duxiu, voiced their unhappiness, but Sneevliet evoked Comintern discipline to pressurise them to agree. In fact asking CCP members to join the Guomindang as individuals was something of a dead issue at this point, as the Guomindang was then in a state of disarray because a warlord had just driven Sun Yat-sen out of Guangzhou. (Feigon, 1983: 172-173).
Events in China reinforced the new policy. By January 1923 Sun Yat-sen had retaken Guangzhou and returned to the city in triumph to re-establish his government there. However the most telling event was the repression of the Beijing-Hankou railworkers strike in February 1923. At Jiangan, the chair of the branch — Lin Xiangqian — was told three times to order a return to work and, when he refused, was beheaded and his head displayed on a bamboo pole. (Chesneaux, 1968: 209). The positions of the Communist Party and the Guomindang were reversed, with the Guomindang now in the ascendant. This finally persuaded Chen Duxiu and most of the other Chinese communists that the working class movement was too weak and that they should enter the Guomindang. Following the line of the Comintern, the CCP resolved that, “The Guomindang should be the central force of the national revolution and should assume its leadership“. Leading members of the Communist Party were initiated into the Guomindang and they held a minority of places on its executive. The Russians helped to rebuild the Guomindang, with Borodin arriving as an adviser to Sun Yat-sen in 1923, and the Whampoa Military Academy was established to train its officers with Russian help.
Why was the working class defeated in the revolution 1925-27?
After the victorious Hong Kong strike in January-March 1922 the Chinese labour movement grew rapidly. The CCP helped organise unions and played a major role in the founding of the first National Congress of Labour which met on 1 May 1922 with delegates representing 300,000 workers. Despite the murderous repression, the workers remained unbowed. On May Day 1924, 200,000 workers in Guangzhou and 100,000 in Shanghai marched for an eight-hour day. By May 1925, at the second National Congress of Labour, the trade unions announced a membership of 540,000. (Rousset, 1987: 8, 10). At this point strikes over wages spread through Japanese textile mills in Shanghai. Strikers were killed on the picket line, and thousands marched in protest. At a demonstration on 30 May, 1925, British police fired into a demonstration, killing 10 and wounding countless others. The Shanghai General Union, led by the CCP, organised a general strike two days later in all foreign owned companies. Over 160,000 workers were out by mid-June, and the strike began to spread to Chinese owned businesses. On 23 June, British and French troops shot at a demonstration in Guangzhou, killing 52 and injuring over a hundred. A general strike was called in Hong Kong, run by a Strikers Delegate Congress of over 800 delegates (out of around 50,000 strikers).
As Chesneaux put it, “The responsibilities of the strike committee went far beyond the normal field of activities dealing with a work stoppage. During the summer of 1925 the committee became, in fact, a kind of workers’ government — and indeed the name applied to it by both its friends and its enemies was ‘Government No. 2’” (1968: 292-293). The strike committee extended its activities to Guangzhou, and the strike lasted nearly 16 months. During that time, British power in China was virtually paralysed and the Guomindang was able to declare itself the national government. Plainly the situation had changed. In 1923 the CCP had 300 members and reached only 1000 in the spring 1925. Yet by November 1925 it had grown to 10,000 members. When the third National Congress of Labour met in May 1926 the trade unions announced a membership of 1,240,000 — by April 1927 the figure was 2.8 million. (Rousset, 1987: 11). Although the combined activity of the Comintern and Soviet diplomacy had contributed to the parallel growth of the CCP and Guomindang, they were now on a collision course.
What was the outcome of this revolutionary situation? On 20 March 1926 Chiang Kai-shek, who became leader of the Guomindang after Sun Yat-sen’s death, ordered a surprise attack on a revolutionary naval unit headed by Communists in Guangzhou. The political advisers attached to this unit were arrested, along with the Soviet advisers. Chiang became master of the city, eliminating his opponents within the Guomindang. He fixed limits on CCP influence within the party. The CCP responded with timidity, accepting Chiang’s conditions. In July 1926 Chiang launched the Northern expedition, aiming to drive out the warlords and unify the country under his command. Meanwhile the peasant war reached an apex. In 1926, the first National Congress of the Peasant Movement met, claiming one million members. In July 1926 the CCP set up a Peasant Department, with Mao Zedong as its head; by 1927 the party influenced approximately ten million peasants. Yet the CCP continued to denounce and hold back the peasants in Central China from rioting, pillaging and massacring landlords. In October 1926 Chiang’s army ended the Guangzhou-Hong Kong strike and boycott. Only after Wang Jingwei set up an alternative Guomindang government in Wuhan did the Communists break with Chiang and instead supported the “left-wing” of the Guomindang.
The revolution was still in the ascendant. In November 1926 the Guomindang government moved from Guangzhou to Wuhan. The British were forced to abandon their concessions in this region. Chesneaux explained that, “the unions of Hubei and Hunan were, in fact, becoming a ‘workers’ government’ to an even greater extent than those of Guangzhou had been during the Hong Kong strike and boycott.” (1968: 325). They controlled large amounts of money, organised armed pickets — effectively a workers’ militia paid for by the factories through the unions. The CCP grew to 30,000 members in July 1926 and 58,000 by the spring of 1927. At the time of the Northern Expedition the CCP organised 1.2 million workers and 800,000 peasants, especially through its influence in the nationalist Fourth Army. (Bianco, 1971: 55-56). In Shanghai in March 1927, workers greeted the incoming armies of the Guomindang as liberating heroes, rising magnificently with nearly 800,000 out on strike. Workers militias effectively controlled the city, and new trade unions sprang up. An insurrection in Shanghai handed over power to the general trade union and the Communists. Chiang’s response on 12 April, 1927 was to orchestrate the massacre of the Shanghai working class, crush the trade unions, the peasant associations and the Communist Party. Victor Serge summed up the cataclysm:
“What has happened? This: on March 21-22, a working class insurrection, headed by the trade unions and few handfuls of courageous Communist militants, took Shanghai, China’s real industrial and commercial capital, after a bitter street battle against the troops of the northern reaction. The proletariat carried out this exploit under the muzzles of English, French, American, Japanese and Italian cannon (not to mention the rest). Less than a month later, on April 13-14, the Generalissimo commanding the revolutionary-nationalist armies of the Guomindang had this proletariat treacherously disarmed and machine-gunned, defeated and strangled in a single night by his official allies. And this grievous blow —foreseen and announced for many weeks by the bourgeois press of every country — was a sad, frightful surprise for the working class militants and Communists of all countries.”(1994: 63).
In April-May 1927 the CCP held its fifth congress in Wuhan. Chen Duxiu’s supporters were largely removed from the central committee and the CCP further assimilated into the Guomindang. After Chiang’s massacre, the CCP, on the orders of Borodin, switched its allegiance to the “Left Guomindang” led by Wang Jingwei. Two Communists joined the Wuhan government, as ministers for labour and for agriculture, and were promptly sent into the countryside to suppress the insurrectionary peasants. Chen Duxiu resigned as General Secretary of the CCP, scapegoated for the defeats of the party. On 19 July 1927 the so-called left-wing of the Guomindang expelled the CCP and reunited with Chiang. Borodin fled China, just as the party he had so successfully reorganised along “Bolshevik” (in reality Stalinist) lines, finally triumphed. The CCP called for a general strike, but hardly a factory came out in support. Even for Zheng Chaolin, the workers by now looked on the CCP as a second Guomindang rather than their own party. (Benton, 1997: 130).
But the Chinese revolution had a final, cruel epilogue. The strategy of subordination to the Guomindang had obviously failed and the workers’ had lost the initiative. Instead the Communists were ordered to organise a series of urban and rural insurrections, known as the Autumn Harvest risings. This culminated in the disastrous ‘Canton insurrection’, in which the CCP were ordered to take over Guangzhou by military force. Although Communist leaders in the city warned that an uprising was out of the question, the order was enforced by two of Comintern emissaries, who organised the uprising and used the Russian consulate as the insurgents’ headquarters. (Bianco, 1971: 69). Not surprisingly, the putsch was isolated from the working class and easily put down. But it finally severed the link between the Communists and the working class. An estimated 38,000 Communists were liquidated. (Rousset, 1987: 12).
What conclusions can be drawn from this defeat?
“But it is precisely why I believe you have made an error... where you say that in China, ‘two camps that are bitterly hostile to one another have come into being: in one are the imperialists and militarists and certain layers of the Chinese bourgeoisie; and on the other are the workers, artisans, petty bourgeoisie, students, intelligentsia and certain groups from the middle bourgeoisie with a nationalist orientation...’ In fact, there are three camps in China — the reactionaries, the liberal bourgeoisie and the proletariat — fighting for hegemony over the lower strata of the petty bourgeoisie and peasantry. We know how complex and contradictory the course of the revolution is, especially in such a huge and — to an overwhelming extent — backward country like China. The revolution can still pass through a series of ebbs and flows. What we must safeguard in the course of the revolution is above all the independent party of the proletariat that is constantly evaluating the revolution from the point of view of three camps, and is capable of fighting for the hegemony in the third camp and, by so doing, in the entire revolution.” Leon Trotsky, [1927].(2) (My emphasis)
The betrayal of the Chinese revolution was a major issue of disagreement between Stalin, who after 1923 consolidated his leadership of the USSR and over the Comintern, and the Left Opposition led by Trotsky. At its root were different conceptions of the revolutionary potential of the Chinese working class, with Stalin subordinating the Communist Party to the needs of Soviet diplomacy, whereas Trotsky perceived the need for further socialist revolutions, as part of his celebrated theory of permanent revolution.
The first disagreement concerned the nature of the Guomindang. Stalin, interpreting Sneevliet, argued the Guomindang was a “bloc of four classes”, or a workers and peasants’ party, whereas Trotsky saw it as a straightforward bourgeois formation.(3) While Trotsky did not reject an alliance between the Chinese Communists and the Guomindang, he was alarmed at the form it took. However Stalin enforced his analysis within the Comintern, which meant the vanguard of the Chinese proletariat was not merely allied, but actively subordinated to the nationalists. This was well summed up by Comintern representatives in March 1926: “The present period is one in which the Communists should do coolie service for the Guomindang.” (Duxiu, 1976: 601). In fact, following Stalin’s policy during this period, the Comintern seemed to replace the working class with the peasantry as the main revolutionary protagonist in backward countries.
Yet within the Comintern, and the Chinese Communist Party, there were early voices who concurred with Trotsky rather than Stalin. As Zheng Chaolin explained, “[In 1924] Peng Shuzhi brought back an article from Moscow titled Who Leads the Chinese National Revolution? He said that after the achievement of the national revolution, we would still need to carry out ‘our own’ revolution. But he also said that the revolution that is ‘not our own’ would ‘automatically’ come under the leadership of the proletariat. This theory of the proletariat constituting the natural leadership of the national revolution was to the exact taste of the Chinese comrades and became the guiding theory in the Party during those few years.” (Benton, 1997: 110). In fact on at least five occasions Chen Duxiu advocated a change of policy instead of the “united front from within”. (Feigon 1983: 176). The root of Stalin’s errors was his analysis of events in China as a struggle between two camps, essentially the imperialist powers and warlords on one side, and the nationalists on the other, with the socialist revolution put off to some distant point in the future. This was particularly damaging when a revolutionary situation developed in 1925, and the forces of counter-revolution gathered around the Guomindang. The centrality of the working class — the third camp perspective which Trotsky articulated in 1927 was well explained at the time by Victor Serge:
“China has almost five million industrial or craft workers (120,000 railway men, 420,000 miners, 300,000 textile workers and 200,000 metal workers). Working class centres such as Shanghai, Hankou and the mines of Hainan are strong strategic positions for the proletariat. All the recent epoch-making events of the Chinese Revolution are those of working class action. The boycott of Hongkong kept up for 16 months is the work of the Guangzhou workers (the Cantonese bourgeoisie, helped by the National government, has lifted it). The great Shanghai strikes of 1925 marked the take-off point of the revolution. The taking of the British concession in Hankou by proletarians is the greatest victory of the ‘Northern Campaign’. Then followed the admirable exploit that was the seizure of Shanghai by the workers’ insurrection...” (1994: 78).
In March 1926, the Guomindang was admitted to the Communist International as a sympathising party and Chiang made an honourary member, with only Trotsky voting against. When Chiang organised his coup later the same month, the news was suppressed in the USSR and the Comintern press glowed with pride at the “revolutionary government” (Isaacs, 1938: 125). In April 1926 Trotsky appealed to the Politburo for a change of line and in September he formally moved for the CCP to withdraw from the Guomindang. (Evans and Block, 1976: 116). Trotsky called for soviets in China at the Politburo in March 1927, before Chiang’s bloody coup. He would seek to salvage the situation for the Chinese party at the Comintern in May 1927, his articles for the Soviet press having been rejected. He was not to know until long afterwards that Chen Duxiu and his supporters were struggling for precisely the same independent orientation, only to be thwarted by the Comintern.(4)
In October 1926 Stalin sent a telegram which urged the Chinese Communists to moderate the peasant movement in order to preserve the alliance with the Guomindang. When the CCP requested 5,000 rifles to advance the peasant struggle they were denied by Borodin. The Comintern still upheld the alliance even though the nationalist government imposed compulsory arbitration in strikes and the unions remained illegal in “liberated” areas. The Communists pledged not to criticise Sun Yat-sen — indeed its “daily” paper only appeared irregularly as a weekly. As late as April 1927, Stalin boasted that the Guomindang would be “utilised to the end, squeezed like a lemon and then thrown away”. (Isaacs, 1938:185). In fact it was Chiang who tossed away the Communists. Even as he did so, Comintern agents were still ordering Shanghai and other workers to surrender their arms to him. Max Shachtman summed up the tragedy of Chinese revolution:
“Victory lay within reach of the hand for the Chinese workers and peasants, but something unprecedented in history took place: the leadership, clothed in all the formal authority of the Russian revolution and the Communist International, stood in the way like a solid wall. Stalin and Bukharin prohibited the proletariat from taking power. In the Chinese revolution the epigones played to the end, and with tragic results, the role which Lenin’s struggle in the Bolshevik party in April-May 1917 prevented them from playing in the Russian revolution.“ (1974: 34).
Trotsky’s third camp analysis upheld the independent role of the working class but was flexible enough to incorporate tactics towards both the bourgeois Guomindang and an alliance with the peasantry. (It would prove flexible enough to address the Japanese invasion in 1937 too.) Trotsky responded concretely to the reality of the situation as it developed, posing tasks for the Communist Party so that it could play its historic role as the vanguard of the working class. It is impossible to judge in hindsight whether, if the communists had followed Trotsky’s directives, they would have inevitably led the working class to power. But all the objective prerequisites for a successful seizure of power were present by 1927, except for the necessary leadership to consummate the process.
Only a few hundred supporters of Trotsky, from within the CCP and from amongst the returning students from Moscow, drew the lessons from this disaster and retained a commitment to the working class in China. Among them were Chen Duxiu, Peng Shuzhi and Zheng Chaolin, leading figures from the leadership of the Communist Party. According to Wang Fanxi, by late 1927 Chen had already come into contact with some of Trotsky’s ideas from students returning from Moscow. (Feigon 1983: 199). By the middle of 1929 Chen Duxiu had organised an opposition group and Liu Renjing had made direct contact with Trotsky. On 1 May 1931 the unification of the Chinese Left Opposition (CLO) took place, with 438 members. If the prospects were bright after unification, why did the Chinese Opposition fail to make an impact? Remaining in cities, they were decimated by Guomindang and later CCP repression. Benton argues that the disciplinary measures of the CCP, together with its relative affluence compared to the CLO (the CCP received $400,000 a month from the USSR) were significant, but the main reason was Guomindang repression. Chen and Peng were arrested in October 1932 (1996: 109-113). Benton also argued that they were unable to develop a strategy for the new opportunities which opened up after the Japanese invasion in 1937. Although the were some Trotskyist-led guerrillas, including some 2000 in Shandong, they were destroyed by the CCP. (Fanxi, 1991: 214). Nevertheless they held up the banner of authentic Marxism in a period of terrible defeat for the working class, and despite their size, offered a way out of this impasse for the Chinese proletariat.
• For references and bibliography, see the full article here
