Vol. 71/No. 48      December 24, 2007

This is the second article in a series outlining developments in the class struggle in China and its place in the world, from the Chinese revolution of 1911 to today. The first article (see the December 10 Militant) focused on the Chinese revolution of 1925-27. That revolution was defeated because of the class-collaborationist course adopted by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) at the insistence of the Communist International under the bureaucratic misleadership of Joseph Stalin.

The young CCP, founded in 1921, had originally been inspired by the revolutionary course of the Bolsheviks under the leadership of V.I. Lenin, which was reversed with the rise of a privileged, bureaucratic social caste in the Soviet Union.

As the Chinese revolution unfolded, with massive peasant movements in the countryside pressing for land, and working-class uprisings in the cities, the CCP told revolutionary-minded workers to look to the Kuomintang, the bourgeois nationalist party in China, for leadership in the battle to free China from imperialist plunder and local feudal oppressors. Tens of thousands of workers paid with their lives for the disaster that followed.

Kuomintang troops, led by Gen. Chiang Kai-shek, attacked the Communist Party forces, who were both politically and physically disarmed, in city after city, forcing them to retreat to the countryside in late 1927.

The CCP regrouped its forces, abandoned its line of political support to the Kuomintang, and opened guerrilla warfare against Chiang Kai-shek’s troops. Mao Zedong emerged as the commander of the CCP forces, known then as the Red Army. The army established a base in Jiangxi province in central-east China and quickly gained support from the local peasantry.  
 
Japanese imperialists invade China
In 1931, imperialist Japan invaded the Chinese province of Manchuria in the north and established a puppet regime. The bourgeois Kuomintang was unwilling to put up an effective fight against the invasion. It was focused on fighting the CCP. The Red Army, on the other hand, did carry out armed resistance to the Japanese invaders. As the only political force in China organizing to repel the Japanese, it won support among workers, peasants, and students.

The Mao-led forces remained in the countryside, largely isolated from the working class in the urban centers, however. By 1934 the Kuomintang surrounded the CCP base in Jiangxi and forced the Red Army into a retreat, mostly on foot, in what became known as the “Long March” to Yenan in northern China. By the time the combatants arrived there in 1935, their army of nearly 90,000 soldiers had been reduced to 20,000.

By 1936 the Japanese forces had occupied most coastal areas of China and began to expand their offensive into the mainland. Working people in both city and countryside increasingly turned against the Kuomintang for its refusal to lead a fight against the imperialist aggressors.

Just at this time, the Stalinized Communist International dictated to the CCP and other Communist parties around the world another 180-degree turn in political line. They were to enter into an alliance with the so-called progressive bourgeoisie in their country to defeat the mounting fascist threat. Mao dutifully sought to rebuild an alliance with Chiang.

In September 1937 the Central Committee of the CCP issued a manifesto laying out the terms under which it would enter an alliance with the Kuomintang. The party adopted the Kuomintang program, which defended the property rights of capitalists and agreed to abandon the fight for land reform, abolish the soviets (workers and peasant councils) it had established in liberated areas, and dissolve the Red Army into the Kuomintang’s National Revolutionary Army. The CCP remained subordinated to the Kuomintang throughout World War II, accepting Chiang Kai-shek’s treacherous leadership of the war effort.

With the 1945 defeat of Tokyo in the world imperialist war, Chiang was determined to resume the civil war against the CCP. The Kuomintang carried out forced conscription of peasants into the army and demanded they provide food to its soldiers, fueling revolts in the countryside. Students organized demonstrations against the Kuomintang tyranny. Inflation soared, provoking strikes by workers. But the Mao-led CCP did not encourage the working class to enter the struggle. Workers in the cities were counseled to wait for their “liberation” by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), the successor to the Red Army.

In line with the class-collaborationist course Stalin had promised the U.S. and European imperialists after the war, Mao proposed the CCP enter a capitalist coalition government with the Kuomintang. The Communist Party offered major concessions to the Kuomintang, conceding eight of its “liberated areas” and agreeing to delay expropriation of the landlords indefinitely. But Chiang vetoed the idea and demanded the CCP’s total surrender, despite efforts by the U.S. government to broker a deal.  
 
Washington’s role
Washington had had its eyes on China since before the war. It had heavily armed Chiang’s army in the hopes it could defeat the PLA. The U.S. rulers had also planned to use GIs stationed in the Pacific to intervene in China to end the civil war in Chiang’s favor. But it was unable to carry out this plan when U.S. troops, the majority of them workers and farmers, began to rebel in late 1945 against an extension of their tour of duty and organized huge demonstrations, demanding to be sent home immediately. (For more about this, see the article “1945: When U.S. troops said ‘No!’” by Mary-Alice Waters in New International No. 7.)

To buy time, the U.S. imperialists tried to convince Chiang to accept the coalition government offered by the CCP. The dictator steadfastly refused, even as his regime was crumbling.

Mao did not abandon his goal of a coalition regime with Chiang until 1947, with the beginning of the Cold War and renewed attacks by Chiang’s army. In October 1947 the PLA issued a manifesto advocating the overthrow of the Kuomintang, the expropriation of the large landlords, and the building of a “New China.”

The call for land reform galvanized millions of peasants who began mobilizing against the landlords and their allies. The PLA took control of city after city as the peasants in the Kuomintang’s army refused to fight. Chiang’s hated regime quickly fell apart.

In October 1949 the PLA marched into Nanjing, marking their definitive triumph over the Kuomintang. Chiang and his forces fled to Taiwan and set up a capitalist regime there.

These revolutionary developments had deep support in the working class. But Mao refused to mobilize workers in the cities, even as the PLA marched into the industrial centers. When the revolution triumphed, the peasant army was used in some cases to suppress workers’ strikes.  
 
Workers and peasants government
The revolution put in power a workers and peasants government, one independent of the bourgeoisie. The Chinese capitalists had lost political power, while capitalist economic relations continued to hold sway. The CCP initiated a major land reform, but promised the industrial bourgeoisie that their factories would remain in private hands. Holdovers from the Chiang regime remained in the state bureaucracy.

Washington had no intention of allowing the Chinese revolution to succeed, and it was worried about revolutionary developments in the Korean peninsula. In 1950 U.S. troops invaded Korea to halt the spread of socialist revolution. They moved quickly toward China’s border. Threatened by this assault, China entered the war on insurgent Korea’s side on Nov. 25, 1950. Millions of Chinese peasant and worker soldiers mobilized to push the imperialist troops back from the border and out of the Korean peninsula. Washington retaliated with a blockade and the freezing of China’s assets in U.S. banks.

As the Chinese masses began to mobilize to defend their revolution, the government felt compelled to reinitiate land reform in the countryside. Peasant committees arose that began putting big landowners on trial and punishing criminals from the old capitalist regime. The effort to sweep out counterrevolutionary and bourgeois forces spread to the cities, as thousands of large business owners were tried for theft and corruption and crooked officials in the state apparatus were ousted.

By October 1952, some 80 percent of heavy industry and 40 percent of light industry were nationalized. Ninety percent of banking and trade were also brought under control of the state. A monopoly of foreign trade was established. China had overturned capitalism and become a workers state.

Due to its Stalinist leadership, the workers state was bureaucratically deformed from the beginning. This would mark both its domestic and its foreign policy in the decades to come. That will be the subject of the last article in this series.

Link to first article in series