Comintern Leadership and the Chinese Revolution

From 1926 onward, with signs of serious tension between the two parties, the facile description of the goals of the Chinese revolution in the United Front slogans was challenged by Trots-kyites in Moscow. It is not clear how the various factions in the Comintern reacted to the first coup d'état by Chiang K'ai-shek after the Chungshan incident in March 1926, but it seems likely that some disagreement was responsible for the restatement of the Comintern position on China in the seventh plenum of the executive committee of the Comintern in December 1926, a few months before Trotsky's opposition to Stalin's China policy broke out into the open. This plenary session recognized Chiang

[16] Tsou Ching-fang, "Chung-kuo nung-min ti kuo-ch'u hsien-tsai chi chiang-lai" (The Past, the Present, and the Future of the Chinese Peasantry), CKNM , 4 (April 1926):425–440. Tsou examined the relationship between land distribution and the peasant question from the beginning of the Chou dynasty to the present. He pointed to the Chou as the period when private property had replaced state ownership as the origin of peasant suffering and recommended the nationalization and the redistribution of land as the solution of the future (p. 439).

as a representative of the grande bourgeoisie but decided nevertheless to continue the United Front.^[17]

With the launching of the Northern Expedition in mid-1926, it became increasingly evident that the Communists and the Nationalists had different ideas on what constituted "feudal forces" in China. When the Communists began to encourage extensive land reform and class struggle in the captured areas, the KMT reaction was swift. On April 12, 1927 Chiang, with the acquiescence of the bourgeoisie and the foreigners, massacred all the Communists and Communist sympathizers he could lay his hands on in Shanghai. The debacle of the United Front was completed with the split in Wuhan in July 1927 between the Communists and the left-wing KMT under Wang Ching-wei. It was in this period that the Comintern controversy on China policy flared up and was soon carried over into China.^[18]

Trotsky's challenge to Stalin's policies was based on his own analysis of the Chinese social structure. He argued that, in China, power was not in the hands of "feudal forces," personified by militarists or even landlords, but lay with the bourgeoisie. Rural leadership was in fact indistinguishable from the bourgeoisie:

Large and middle class landownership (as it exists in China) is most closely intertwined with urban, including foreign, capitalism. There is no landowning caste in China in opposition to the bourgeoisie. The most widespread, generally hated, exploiter in the village is the usurious wealthy peasant, the agent of urban banking capital. The agrarian revolution has therefore as much of an anti-feudal as it has of an anti-bourgeois character in China.^[19]

If the urban and rural elite were inextricably bound together, the relationship between the composite Chinese bourgeoisie and

[17] B. Schwartz, Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1967), pp. 58–59.

[18] This is not to say, as the preceding discussion shows, that the debates in the Soviet Union initiated the discussion of revolution. But they did set forth the alternatives which later delineated the discussion in China.

[19] Leon Trotsky, "The Canton Insurrection" (Alma Ata, 1928) in L. Trotsky, Problems of the Chinese Revolution , ed. by Max Shachtman (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967), p. 125.

imperialists was no less intimate. In a comprehensive statement on the bonds between imperialism and Chinese society, Trotsky wrote,

Imperialism, which violently hampers the economic development of China by its customs, its financial and military policy, condemns the worker to beggary and the peasant to the cruelest enslavement. The struggle against the big landlords, the struggle against the usurer, the struggle against the capitalists for better working conditions is thus raised by itself to the struggles for national independence of China for the liberation of its productive forces from the bonds and chains of foreign imperialism. There is the principal and the mightiest foe. It is mighty not only because of its warships, but also directly by its inseparable connections with the heads of the banks, the usurers, the bureaucrats and the militarists, with the Chinese bourgeoisie, and by the more direct but no less intimate ties with the big commercial and industrial bourgeoisie.^[20]

Hence, Trotsky continued, the anti-imperialist struggle for national liberation in China was also a class struggle. If China were to achieve national liberation and the progress of its productive forces, the proletariat must lead the rest of the laboring masses in a struggle against imperialists and the Chinese economic and political elite.^[21]

Summarizing Trotsky's ideas in his debates with Stalin and his supporters, of whom the most eminent at this time was N. Bukharin, Trotsky held that (1) although China had a powerful bourgeois class, this class was not capable of carrying the burden of the bourgeois-democratic struggle because of its economic dependence on foreign imperialism (in spite of certain divergent interests) and also because it was not a fully developed industrial bourgeoisie; (2) the leadership of the national liberation struggle, therefore, devolved upon the proletariat, who must simultaneously conduct class struggle with the

[20] Trotsky, "First Speech on the Chinese Question," delivered at the eighth plenum of the executive committee of the Communist International (Moscow, May 1927). In ibid., pp. 110–111.

[21] Trotsky, of course, did not believe that the interests of the Chinese bourgeoisie coincided with those of imperialists without qualification. Rather, at some point in the course of the national struggle, the contradiction between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat exceeded that between the bourgeoisie and imperialism. At that point the bourgeoisie would turn against the proletariat. This idea went back to Lenin, National and Colonial Questions .

bourgeoisie; (3) China's productive forces were backward (and imperialism did not help their development but hampered them) in spite of the existence of a bourgeois class; (4) the Chinese revolution should take the noncapitalist path of development.^[22]

Stalin's reaction to Trotskyite critiques of his policies was to reiterate the feudal nature of Chinese society and to reaffirm the correctness of the antifeudal, anti-imperialist strategy of the Chinese revolution. In his own "Problems of the Chinese Revolution," written in response to the events of April 1927, he described the features of the Chinese revolution as follows: (1) China's semicolonial status and the economic and financial dominance of imperialism, (2) the dead weight of feudal survivals in Chinese society, whose effect was aggravated by militarist and bureaucratic oppression, (3) the growing power of the working class and the peasantry in the struggle against feudal-bureaucratic oppression, militarism, and imperialism, (4) the political weakness of the national bourgeoisie, its dependence on imperialism, and its increasing fear of the masses, (5) the existence of the proletarian dictatorship along China's northern borders.^[23]

It has been noted in earlier studies of this period that the Stalinist leadership came very close to Trotsky's suggestions concerning China after the disaster of 1927 but had to resort to many face-saving devices to prove the opposition wrong while coopting its policies.^[24] This was the case on the issue of the goals of the Chinese revolution. In an article published in Pravda on July 28, 1927, Stalin described the aims of the Chinese revolution in terms that came strikingly close to Trotsky's while seemingly rejecting them:

The opposition forgot that the revolutionary struggle of the Chinese people against imperialism is to be explained above all and in the main by

[22] That is, the proletariat would lead the bourgeois-democratic revolution (which had been led by the bourgeoisie in Europe) and proceed on to socialism, following the Russian example.

[23] Joseph Stalin, "Problems of the Chinese Revolution," in Selections from V. L Lenin and J. V. Stalin on National Colonial Question (Calcutta, 1970), p. 197.

[24] Schwartz, Chinese Communism , passim.

the fact that in China imperialism is that force which supports and inspires the direct exploiters of the Chinese people — the feudalists, the militarists, the capitalists, the bureaucrats, etc., that the Chinese workers and peasants cannot conquer these exploiters of theirs without waging at the same time a struggle against imperialism.^[25]

Stalin here pits the workers and peasants against all members of a variegated ruling class in alliance with imperialists. In other statements, however, he made clear that the chief internal enemies of the Chinese revolution were the "feudal forces." These forces he described as the militarists and bureaucrats as well as "feudal and medieval methods of exploitation and oppression of the peasantry," which later became the basis of Chinese Marxists' arguments that China was a "feudal" society. Furthermore, without denying that mercantile capital played an important role in China (an effective weapon in the Trotskyite arsenal), Stalin argued that this situation existed side by side with and, presumably, served and intensified feudal exploitation (rather than transforming the feudal mode of production, as the Trotskyires suggested), as the Chinese Marxists also concluded later. Stalin's elaboration of the nature of Chinese society is worth quoting at some length to demonstrate the convoluted nature of the argumentation which he bequeathed to his followers in China.

The opposition had heard that the mercantile bourgeoisie had penetrated into the Chinese countryside and had rented land to the propertyless peasants. The opposition knows that the merchant is not feudal. Hence the ready-made formula: the remnants of feudalism — meaning also the struggle of the peasantry against the survivals of feudalism — has no serious significance in the Chinese revolution, that the main thing in China at the present is not the agrarian revolution but the question of the state-customs independence of China from imperialist countries.

But the opposition does not see that the peculiarity of Chinese economy does not consist in the penetration of mercantile capital in the Chinese countryside but in the combination of the domination of feudal survivals and the existence of mercantile [sic] capital in the Chinese countryside with the preservation of the feudal and medieval methods of exploitation and oppression of the peasantry.

[25] Stalin, "Comments on Current Affairs in China," Pravda , July 28, 1927. In Selections , p. 205.

The opposition does not understand that the entire present/day military bureaucratic machine in China, which despoils and oppresses the Chinese peasantry inhumanly, is in essence the political superstructure over this combination of the domination of feudal survivals and feudal methods of exploitation with the existence of commercial capital in the countryside. And, indeed, facts showed later that the great agrarian revolution developed in China which was directed, above all and in the main, against the small and the big feudalists of China. . . . Facts showed that the feudalists not only exist in China but also hold power in their hands in a whole number of provinces. They are subjecting to their will the leadership of the Kuo-mintang [sic] and are dealing blow after blow to the Chinese revolution.

After this to deny the presence of feudal survivals and the feudal system of exploitation as the main form of oppression in the Chinese countryside, not to admit after this the agrarian revolution as the main fact of the Chinese revolutionary movement at the present moment, would mean going against obvious facts.^[26]

The confusing nature of the opposing positions in the Comintern debates as they pertained to revolutionary strategy has been discussed elsewhere. The casual use of social and historical categories such as capitalist, feudalism, the bourgeoisie, the feudalists, in these discussions of the Chinese revolution created comparable difficulties when the terms were taken literally as concepts of social-historical analysis. Since the context in which they employed these terms did not demand rigorous definitions, neither Trotsky nor Stalin made clear whether the "bourgeoisification" of Chinese society or the "dominance of feudal survivals," as the case might be, implied that Chinese society had already entered the capitalist stage of historical development or that the feudal system still persisted. In the case of Trotsky, it seems clear that he took the presence of imperialism to mean a change in the nature of the mode of production. Even though China's productive forces were not (and could not be) developed under existing circumstances, imperialist activity and support increased the power of the native bourgeoisie and spread the effects of the bourgeois mode of production (he might have said market economy!) throughout Chinese society. Some of his followers in Russia and China, however, deduced

[26] Ibid., pp. 205–206.

from his observations that capitalism as a system was already the dominant feature of Chinese economic and social organization.^[27] Stalin, on the other hand, did not say the Chinese social and political system was a feudal system in the sense that medieval Europe was feudal; he only alluded to the power of feudal survivals or remnants (which might refer to anything from economic or political power to ideological survivals such as the persistence of kinship values) in obstructing the progress of revolution. Nevertheless, the casual use of such categories, combined with the belief in rigid schema of history, created obstacles to social and historical analysis in the next few years and continue to do so in Chinese historiography.