BY MIKE TABER

The Chinese revolution was one of the 20th century's momentous events. One quarter of the human race tore itself free of the grip of the capitalists and landlords. This fact remains of decisive importance in world politics today.

To help readers gain a better understanding of this revolution, Pathfinder is reissuing this month two books that have been unavailable for several years: Leon Trotsky on China and The Chinese Communist Party in Power by P'eng Shu-tse. As these books explain, there have actually been three revolutions in China this century.

In 1911, a democratic revolution led by Sun Yat-sen overthrew the Manchu Dynasty, which had ruled China since 1644. A second revolution occurred in 1925-27, but was crushed at the hands of Chiang Kai-shek representing China's capitalists and landlords. The third Chinese revolution culminated when the Chinese Red Army led by Mao Zedong overthrew the U.S.-backed Chiang regime in 1949.

Leon Trotsky on China is primarily devoted to the 1925-27 revolution and its aftermath. That event was sparked by an incident in Shanghai on May 30, 1925, when a demonstration of thousands of workers and students protesting imperialist domination was fired upon by British police, killing seven. Workers throughout China responded with a general strike and mass demonstrations. Millions of peasants were soon drawn into the struggle, seeking to free themselves from the iron grip of the landlords and local warlords. A central force of the movement was the young Chinese Communist Party. Chinese CP shackled by Stalin
But the Chinese CP was shackled with a political line imposed on it by Joseph Stalin, who headed the rising petty- bourgeois caste that had usurped power in the Soviet Union. Under the banner of a "bloc of four classes," Stalin had called for supporting the bourgeois nationalist Kuomintang party led by Chiang Kai-shek, and insisted that the Chinese CP subordinate itself to Chiang's command.

In carrying out this policy, the CP was ordered to put the brakes on peasant struggles for land and workers' fights and for better living and working conditions. But this wasn't enough for the landlords and capitalists, who saw their privileges and class rule mortally threatened. In the end, working people were left disarmed, politically and militarily, when Chiang carried out a bloodbath against the workers movement in April 1927.

Leon Trotsky was a leader of the communist forces in the Soviet Union who fought to reverse Stalin's political line on the Chinese revolution. Defending the perspective of V.I. Lenin and the first four congresses of the Communist International, Trotsky and other communists maintained that only an alliance of workers and peasants could lead the democratic revolution in China to victory. They called for the creation of soviets (councils) of workers and peasants throughout China, for political independence of the Communist Party, and for working- class leadership of the fight against imperialism and the local capitalists and landlords.

This perspective is presented clearly in Trotsky's articles "Class Relations in the Chinese Revolution" and "The Chinese Revolution and the Theses of Comrade Stalin," written in March and April 1927 and available in Leon Trotsky on China. It is also presented in "The Platform of the Opposition," which can be found in The Challenge of the Left Opposition 1926-27, also published by Pathfinder. `Their Trotsky and ours'
By 1928, however, Trotsky made a shift. While continuing to attack the Stalinist betrayal of Leninism, he extended his criticism to the slogan originally formulated by Lenin himself of a "democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry," which Trotsky had defended in his earlier articles. That slogan had been grossly distorted by Stalin to justify support to the Kuomintang and Chiang. Trotsky now believed that the slogan itself, not just Stalin's distortion of it, was wrong.

A useful piece to read in conjunction with Leon Trotsky on China is "Their Trotsky and Ours," by SWP national secretary Jack Barnes, published in issue no. 1 of the Marxist magazine New International. In this article, which takes up the key issues of the Chinese revolution, Barnes discusses Trotsky's role as the central communist leader who fought to continue the program and strategy of Lenin following the degeneration of the Russian revolution and the Communist International under Stalin. Barnes reviews Trotsky's shift of position on China and its implications.

"Trotsky accurately demonstrated the danger of the Stalin- Bukharin leadership's accelerating flight from the revolutionary course charted by the Comintern while Lenin was alive," Barnes writes. "In doing so, however, Trotsky introduced an erroneous leftist bias into the alternative course he projected for the Communist International."

Of considerable interest in Leon Trotsky on China are the Bolshevik leader's writings on the Sino-Japanese war that began in the 1930s. Arguing against ultraleftists who maintained that workers should take a neutral stance, Trotsky wrote, "The duty of all the workers' organizations of China was to participate actively and in the front lines of the present war against Japan, without abandoning, for a single moment, their own program and independent activity."

Another important contribution is Trotsky's 1932 article "Peasant War in China and the Proletariat." In it he discusses the class nature of Mao's Red Army, which had been set up in the countryside following the defeat of the 1925-27 revolution, and the working-class stance toward it. Third Chinese revolution
The third Chinese revolution is the theme of The Chinese Communist Party in Power by P'eng Shu-tse. The author was a central leader of the Chinese CP throughout the period of the second Chinese revolution. He was expelled from the party in 1929 for supporting Trotsky's defense of Lenin's perspective. From then until his death in 1983, P'eng devoted his efforts to rebuilding a communist movement in China and internationally.

In several contributions in this collection, P'eng reviews the revolutionary victory of the toilers over Chiang in 1949 and the establishment of a workers state in the early 1950s. He examines the deformations of the revolution under the Stalinist bureaucracy headed by Mao.

Leon Trotsky on China and The Chinese Communist Party in Power provide a historical framework for assessing the Chinese revolution and its lessons for today.  
 
 
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