The Militant - April 13, 2015 -- Stalin’s class collaboration betrayed 1925-27 Chinese Revolution

Vol. 79/No. 13 April 13, 2015

(Books of the Month column)
Stalin’s class collaboration betrayed 1925-27 Chinese Revolution

Below is an excerpt from Leon Trotsky on China, a collection of articles and letters about the powerful revolutionary upsurge that shook the cities and countryside of China in 1925-27, opening the possibility for working people in that country to take political power. But the revolution was crushed at the hands of Chiang Kai-shek and his bourgeois and landlord allies. A central cause of the defeat was the disastrous course of Joseph Stalin, general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in subordinating the Chinese Communist Party to an alliance with the capitalist Nationalist Party (Kuomintang). Trotsky, a leader of the Russian Revolution who was driven into exile by Stalin in 1928, fought to reverse this course. The excerpt includes a piece Trotsky wrote in 1925 as the upsurge began and an evaluation written in 1940 on the lessons of its defeat. Copyright © 1976 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.

BY LEON TROTSKY
The Times, the leading newspaper of the English bourgeoisie, writes that the movement of the Chinese masses reveals a “Moscow spirit.” Well, for once in a way we are prepared to agree with the conservative denunciators. The English press in China and in the British Isles brands the striking workers and students as Bolshevists. Well, we are prepared to a certain extent to support even this terrible revelation. The fact is the Chinese workers object to being shot down by the Japanese police, so they have declared a protest strike and are proclaiming their indignation in the streets. Is it not evident that here the “Moscow spirit” prevails? The Chinese students, filled with sympathy for the workers in their struggle, have joined in the strike against the exercise of violence by foreigners. It is evident, as far as the students are concerned, that we have to deal with Bolshevists.

We of Moscow are prepared to accept all these accusations and revelations. We should like however to add that the best agents for spreading the “Moscow spirit” in the East are the capitalist politicians and journalists. To the question of the ignorant coolie: “What is a Bolshevist?” the English bourgeois press replies: “A Bolshevist is a Chinese worker who does not wish to be shot by Japanese and English police; a Bolshevist is a Chinese student who stretches out a brotherly hand to the Chinese worker who is streaming with blood; a Bolshevist is a Chinese peasant who resents the fact that foreigners, whose arguments are deeds of violence, behave on his land as though they were lord and master.” The reactionary press of both hemispheres gives this excellent description of Bolshevism. …

When the half-naked and half-starved Chinese worker who is oppressed and degraded begins to become conscious of his dignity as a human being, he is told: Moscow agents have egged you on! If he allies himself with other workers to defend his elementary human rights, he is told: this is the “Moscow spirit.” If in the streets of his own town, he tries to defend his right to existence and development, he hears cries of: This is Bolshevism! …

From now onwards every Chinese will know that the “Moscow spirit” is the spirit of revolutionary solidarity which unites the oppressed in the fight against the oppressors; and that on the other hand the atmosphere which pervades the cellars of the English prisons of Shanghai incorporates the spirit of “British freedom.”

❖

The tragic experience of China is a great lesson for the oppressed peoples. The Chinese revolution of 1925–27 had every chance for victory. A unified and transformed China would constitute at this time a powerful fortress of freedom in the Far East. The entire fate of Asia and to a degree the whole world might have been different. But the Kremlin, lacking confidence in the Chinese masses and seeking the friendship of the generals, utilized its whole weight to subordinate the Chinese proletariat to the bourgeoisie and so helped Chiang Kai-shek to crush the Chinese revolution. Disillusioned, disunited, and weakened, China was laid open to Japanese invasion.

Like every doomed regime, the Stalinist oligarchy is already incapable of learning from the lessons of history. At the beginning of the Sino-Japanese War, the Kremlin again placed the Communist Party in bondage to Chiang Kai-shek, crushing in the bud the revolutionary initiative of the Chinese proletariat. This war, now nearing its third anniversary, might long since have been finished by a real catastrophe for Japan, if China had conducted it as a genuine people’s war based on an agrarian revolution and setting the Japanese soldiery aflame with its blaze. But the Chinese bourgeoisie fears its own armed masses more than it does the Japanese ravishers. If Chiang Kai-shek, the sinister hangman of the Chinese revolution, is compelled by circumstances to wage a war, his program is still based, as before, on the oppression of his own workers and compromise with the imperialists.

The war in eastern Asia will become more and more interlocked with the imperialist world war. The Chinese people will be able to reach independence only under the leadership of the youthful and self-sacrificing proletariat, in whom the indispensable self-confidence will be rekindled by the rebirth of the world revolution. They will indicate a firm line of march. The course of events places on the order of the day the development of our Chinese section into a powerful revolutionary party.

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