Vol. 71/No. 46      December 10, 2007

This article begins a series that will take up these questions, starting with the initial efforts by Chinese working people at the beginning of the 20th century to cast off imperialist domination and class exploitation.

In the early 1900s, precapitalist, semifeudal relations prevailed in most of China, especially the countryside. The vast majority of Chinese lived in isolated, rural villages. The country was loosely governed by a royal family and by gangs of wealthy warlords in the different provinces, who allowed imperialist powers like London, Paris, Washington, and Tokyo to freely loot China’s resources.

In 1911 the Manchu dynasty, which had ruled since 1644, was toppled by a bourgeois democratic movement that drew a range of social layers—from anti-imperialist students to capitalist elements chafing under feudal backwardness—into political activity.

The new republic established by Sun Yat-sen, who headed this movement, didn’t last in power for long. Regional warlords, linked to one or another imperialist power, took over. In 1912, Sun Yat-sen formed the Kuomintang (Nationalist Party) to continue the struggle. Initially attracting some revolutionary elements, the Kuomintang became increasingly dominated by bourgeois forces.

Meanwhile, China was experiencing a tumultuous growth in capitalist industry and commerce, especially in the urban centers most exposed to foreign capitalist penetration. From 1913 to 1926, factory and mine production more than doubled. In tobacco and cotton goods, it multiplied five-fold. By 1927, the working class was already 15 million strong, concentrated in coastal cities such as Shanghai, the most industrialized city at the time.

Three-quarters of China’s population remained peasants, most of them landless.  
 
Second Chinese revolution
The birth of a modern working class in China and the impact of World War I and the October 1917 Russian Revolution all gave impetus to growing nationalist sentiment among Chinese against the imperialist powers and the local rulers aiding them.

At the end of the war, Japanese imperialism took over some Chinese territory that their German rivals had controlled. In response, students launched widespread anti-imperialist protests on May 4, 1919. This movement accelerated the broader radicalization among working people, including strikes and other social struggles.

In 1921, some of the young leaders of what had become known as the May 4 Movement founded the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The principal communist groups were in Shanghai and Beijing, led by Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao, respectively.

Trade unionization was proceeding rapidly by this time. The number of organized workers grew more than 10-fold in just a few years: from 230,000 in 1923 to 2.8 million in 1927.

In the countryside peasants began mobilizing. Millions were involved in struggles for land, including some land seizures, in the provinces of Kwangtung, Hunan, Kiangsi, and Hupeh.

In Shanghai, where various imperialist powers still had colonial enclaves, British and U.S. police fired on a 1925 demonstration, killing several students. More than 800,000 workers across the country responded by launching a general strike.

The CCP, although young and inexperienced, had a revolutionary program and became deeply involved in the student, labor, and peasants movements. It was in a good position to help advance the democratic, anti-imperialist revolution that erupted in 1925.

What was needed was an alliance between the workers and the peasantry to take political power and end the reign of the landlords and the imperialists. As a new revolutionary government took measures in the interests of the vast majority, and the propertied classes resisted, more far-reaching steps would be needed, leading to the expropriation of the capitalist class and the socialist reorganization of society.

From the start, the working class, in an alliance with the peasantry, would have to lead the revolution. It would have to be politically independent of the bourgeois nationalist forces, including the Kuomintang.

The CCP initially received valuable collaboration from the Communist International, the world communist organization, under the leadership of V.I. Lenin and the Bolshevik Party in revolutionary Russia.

By 1924, however, the wave of revolutions and workers’ upsurges around the world that followed the Russian Revolution had been defeated. The first world war and then the 1918-20 civil war left the young Soviet Union economically exhausted. These objective conditions helped foster the growth of petty-bourgeois and bureaucratic layers in the Soviet government and Communist Party, mainly concerned with assuring themselves a privileged life. Josef Stalin emerged as their main leader.  
 
CCP joins Kuomintang
Under the Stalin misleadership, revolutionary struggles in other parts of the world were subordinated to the needs of the bureaucracy in the Soviet Union. Rather than helping the Chinese communists lead the working people, the Stalinist forces told the party to subordinate itself to the Kuomintang. Doing so meant putting the brakes on strikes, land seizures, and other independent actions by the toilers. While the Kuomintang was waging an armed struggle against the Chinese warlords, it defended capitalist interests and was conciliatory toward the imperialist oppressors.

At the heart of the class-collaborationist line advocated by the Comintern leadership was the notion that a “bloc of four classes”—a coalition of the “progressive” bourgeoisie, the middle classes, the peasantry, and the working class—was needed to carry out a revolution in China.

Based on this assumption, the Comintern instructed the CCP to join the Kuomintang and, in doing so, give up its political and organizational independence. CCP members were to follow the lead of Chiang Kai-shek, the main leader of the Kuomintang.

Meanwhile, the revolutionary tide deepened. In March 1927, workers in Shanghai led an insurrection and took over the city. As Chiang’s army approached, the CCP, following the Comintern line, told them to put down their arms and welcome the “liberator.”

Stalin declared in early April, “Chiang Kai-shek is submitting to discipline. The Kuomintang is a bloc, a sort of revolutionary parliament, with the Right, Left, and the Communists. Why make a coup d’état? Why drive away the Right, when we have the majority and when the Right listens to us? … When the Right is of no more use to us, we will drive it away. At present, we need the Right… . Chiang Kai-shek has perhaps no sympathy for the revolution but he is leading the army and cannot do otherwise than lead it against the imperialists.”

One week later, on April 12, Chiang unleashed his troops against the politically disarmed Shanghai workers. Some 40,000 were killed. The unions were smashed.

Refusing to draw the conclusions of this disaster, Moscow urged the CCP cadres to focus on Wuhan, asserting that they could carry out an agrarian revolution in collaboration with the “left” Kuomintang of that city. In July, the Wuhan Kuomintang leaders turned on the CCP, killing some of its members, and forcing it out of the city.  
 
Canton uprising
The defeat of the revolution came to a climax with the Dec. 11, 1927, Canton uprising. In a last-ditch adventure to somehow produce a victory, the CCP organized a few thousand workers to take over the city, with no preparation of the working class as a whole or the surrounding peasantry. Up against 50,000 Kuomintang troops, 5,700 workers lost their lives in just two days.

The disastrous course dictated by Stalin’s misleadership did not go unopposed. Within the Soviet Communist Party, Leon Trotsky and other members of the Left Opposition fought for a revolutionary policy in China but failed to win a majority. In China, Chen Duxiu, the first general secretary of the CCP, called for the party to withdraw from the Kuomintang. In August 1927 he was forced out of the leadership and in 1929 was expelled from the CCP. He and other Chinese members of the Left Opposition collaborated with Trotsky over the next decade. (For further reading see The Third International after Lenin and Leon Trotsky on China. They are published by Pathfinder.)

It would be another 20 years before the workers and peasants would finally take power in China. That will the subject of the next article.  
 
 
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