Nationalist Revolution in China

In May 1925 students from eight colleges in the Shanghai area gathered in the city's International Settlement to demonstrate against the system of unequal treaties by which the imperialist powers held their privileges in China and to protest warlord rule throughout the country. A citywide general strike, assisted by funds from Soviet trade unions, followed. Similar antiforeign demonstrations, strikes, and boycotts occurred in more than twenty cities, including Beijing and Wuhan. The May 30th movement, as it was called, set off a massive strike and boycott in Guangzhou (Canton) and Hong Kong, which lasted sixteen months, and led to two years of urban demonstrations, rural rebellions, and military conflict. Together these events comprise the Nationalist Revolution in China.^[39]

The ECCI quickly recognized the May 30th movement as an event of historic significance. It signaled what Zinoviev called the beginning of "a new epoch of wars and revolutions."

The events in China [he stated] will doubtless have a tremendous revolutionizing significance for the other colonies and the countries dependent on imperialist England. Just as in its day the Russian revolution of 1905 had the greatest revolutionizing influence in Turkey, Persia, and China, the present great movement in China will, without doubt, have a tremendous influence on Indo-China, India, etc. The enormous contingents of oppressed humanity who live in the East, numbering hundreds of millions, will greedily seize on every item of news from revolutionary China and will concentrate their thoughts on how they themselves can organize and revolt against the oppressors, the imperialists.... China has revolted today: tomorrow Indo-China and India will rise.^[40]

The ECCI Presidium assisted the May 30th movement by organizing a "Hands Off China" campaign among the parties of the International, a campaign aimed at snarling possible antirevolutionary intervention by the

4.  Coastal China in 1925

China powers—Britain, Japan, France, Italy, and the United States.^[41] In addition, Chinese students, selected by the Control Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, were trained as Russian-speaking military officers and political workers at the Comintern-sponsored Communist University of the Working People of the East (KUTV) in Moscow. The first thirty of them arrived at the highly secret training center in the autumn of 1925; during the next two years over a thousand cadets would be trained. At the same time, Russian and other Soviet citizens were given training in

Chinese and other Asian languages by approximately 100 instructors of the university's Department of Asian Languages.^[42] Thus, Soviet/Comintern involvement in the Chinese Nationalist Revolution was significant. Most important, Soviet military advisers in south China participated directly in planning and carrying out the Northern Expedition, the military campaign that extended the revolution from Guangdong Province into the Yangtze River basin of coastal central China in 1926-27. By the summer of 1925, Bliukher and his staff, working with GMD political and military authorities, had drawn up what he called "The Great Guomindang Military Plan,"^[43] formally recommended the plan to Moscow, and urged financial assistance for it.^[44]

To determine the value of Bliukher's plan, the Central Committee in Moscow appointed a secret commission to conduct an on-site inquiry in China in February-March 1926. The commission was headed by Andrei Bubnov, an early Bolshevik who had been a prominent Red Army staff officer during the Civil War and who directed the army's Central Political Administration and was a member of the Revolutionary Military Council. Its tasks were to study the work of the Soviet military missions in China, to assess the prospects of the Nationalist Revolution, and to make policy recommendations to the Central Committee. After hearing from an extensive list of Soviet representatives in both north and south China, including Borodin and Karakhan, the commission put the most optimistic possible interpretation on the information and opinion it had gathered^[45] and recommended to the Central Committee that the requests of the GMD for military aid be met and that preparations be made for a military campaign to take place within six months.

In this way military advisers from the Red Army, political advisers from the Comintern, and cadres of the Chinese Communist Party were all committed to a massive revolutionary offensive. Never before or afterward did the leadership of the USSR risk assets on this scale in a revolutionary initiative extending beyond the protective umbrella that the forces of the Red Army could provide. Their decision to do so directly influenced the course of the Nationalist Revolution in China, the development of the Chinese Communist Party, the future of the international Communist movement, and the direction of Soviet high politics. How and why a decision of this historical magnitude was taken is one of the great "blank spots" of Soviet history.

What historical scholarship knows from evidence is that a Politburo special committee convened in February 1926 to review policy in East Asia did not recommend sponsoring a revolutionary military offensive in China. Chaired by Trotsky, the committee had as members—in addition to

Chicherin—Kliment Voroshilov, the chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council who would soon become people's commissar for military and naval affairs (1925-40), and Feliks Dzerzhinskii, head of the Cheka/GPU/OGPU (1917-26) and chairman of the Supreme Council of the National Economy (1924-26). The committee issued a report on March 25 entitled "Problems of Our Policy with Respect to China and Japan."^[46] The analysis in the report was based on the axiom that the international situation had become more difficult and dangerous for the USSR, and for all opponents of imperialism, since the onset of capitalist stabilization. The immediate threat confronting them was the possible extension of Locarno (as they saw it) to Asia in the form of a British-led coalition of capitalist states directed against the Chinese Revolution. As a way of precluding an Asian Locarno, the report recommended a complex scheme of interrelated diplomacy and propaganda. The diplomatic task was to drive a wedge between the two primary imperialist powers in East Asia, Britain and Japan, and to prevent a renewed Anglo-Japanese alliance. That wedge would be formed by a tripartite pact among the USSR, China, and Japan. Tokyo would be attracted to this agreement by means of concessions in Manchuria that the Chinese government in Beijing would make to Japan. The Chinese government in turn would be persuaded to offer concessions to Japan because the CPC and the GMD would mobilize the articulate Chinese public in favor of such a policy through a propaganda campaign conducted in new journals of opinion, to be founded presumably with Comintern funds. The CPC and the GMD would be persuaded to mount this campaign by the argument that a Soviet-Chinese-Japanese diplomatic alignment would prolong the respite from imperialist intervention—something that was in the interests of both the Chinese and Russian revolutions.

Significantly, when the Politburo adopted the resolutions of the East Asian policy committee in early April, a statement submitted by Stalin was appended to them: "The Government at Guangzhou should in the present period decisively reject the thought of military operations of an offensive character, and generally any such actions as may provoke the imperialists to embark on military intervention." So, two months before it began, the collective leadership of the CPSU seems to have agreed to oppose a Northern Expedition. They envisaged instead a clearly defensive strategy, one that would utilize both propaganda and diplomacy to protect the revolution in China and, indirectly, the Russian Revolution as well. How then is the involvement of the Red Army and the Comintern in the Northern Expedition to be explained?

When Sun Yat-sen died in March 1925, he left behind two potential successors. One was Wang Jingwei, one of Sun's earliest followers and a

revolutionary hero. The other was Chiang Kai-shek, the pragmatic and nationalist-minded chief of staff of the National Revolutionary Army (NRA). Archival research indicates that Chiang always regarded the GMD's ties to the USSR as purely tactical. He was sharply critical of Sun Yat-sen's political rapprochement with Soviet Russia, although he was quite willing to accept military assistance in the struggle against the clique of warlords who supported the Beijing government.^[47] Moreover, he resented members of the Soviet military mission in south China for their domineering attitudes, for their participation in what Chiang regarded as political matters, and for their control over the distribution of weapons and funds sent from the USSR. He suspected that one of them, Nikolai Kuibyshev, was conspiring with Wang Jingwei to abduct him and send him off to Russia. (Kuibyshev seems to have aroused Chiang's suspicions by dealing with Wang on military matters rather than with Chiang, who, he thought, was misappropriating funds.) On 20 March, at a time when both Borodin and Bliukher were absent from Guangzhou, Chiang launched a successful coup d'état, the results of which were manifold and far-reaching.^[48] He removed Soviet advisers from politically significant positions within the NRA and deported those whom he found most objectionable. Wang went into temporary exile in France. Chiang's power was greatly enhanced. Within three months he was commander in chief of the NRA and had gained control over both the GMD Central Party Headquarters and the military, civil, and financial organs of the Nationalist government. And he saw to it that the position of influence and power held by the CPC as a "bloc within" the Guomindang was sharply curtailed.

The Soviet military and civilian advisers in Guangzhou were not forewarned of Chiang's coup; the CPC leadership was caught unawares; the Politburo and the ECCI Presidium in Moscow were taken by surprise. It took six weeks for them to recover fully and for the situation to be clarified as follows: First, in protracted and intense negotiations with Chiang, Borodin agreed to a sharp curtailment of the influence of the CPC within the councils of both the GMD and the NRA. Among the restrictions imposed on CPC activity, Communists would no longer head any of the bureaus at Guomindang Central Party Headquarters. At the same time, Borodin was able to use Soviet military assistance as a lever with which to limit the influence of the GMD right wing. On the same day that the Russian military mission turned over 8,000 rifles along with ammunition to the NRA, a prominent rightist politician was arrested.

Second, from within the Central Committee of the CPC there was renewed agitation in favor of abandoning the "bloc within" strategy and

withdrawing from the Guomindang and forming instead an interparty alliance of the two organizations. This move, its proponents argued, would enable the CPC to conduct an independent policy, to appeal directly to the urban and rural masses, and to arm the peasants of Guangdong—thereby providing the CPC with military forces to protect the party organization. When this proposal was discussed among the highest ranks of the CPSU collective leadership, Trotsky, according to his later statements, formally proposed the action. Zinoviev reportedly associated himself with Trotsky's position, thereby reversing his earlier stand. But apparently neither of them pressed the point and the "bloc within" strategy stood.^[49] When the issue was fully resolved at a special Politburo session in May, Voitinskii was dispatched to China with specific instructions to correct the separatist tendency within the CPC.

Third, the leadership of the CPSU and of the Communist International agreed to support the long-anticipated Northern Expedition.^[50] Borodin informed Chiang of this sometime in May, and Bliukher and his staff began to work on detailed plans for conducting the campaign. The supply of weapons from Russia, which had begun eighteen months earlier, increased rapidly. Chiang then acted quickly and launched the Northern Expedition on 1 June, apparently before Soviet advisers in Guangzhou and Beijing could agree either among themselves or with the Politburo and ECCI Presidium in Moscow regarding the timing and the objectives of the campaign.

These two decisions—(1) to arm Chiang Kai-shek and to support the Northern Expedition despite the coup d'état of 20 March and Chiang's evident intention to relegate the CPC to a weakened position within the nationalist movement, and (2) to instruct the CPC to remain a "bloc within" the Guomindang—set the China policy of the USSR on a disastrous course. Within little more than a year, the Soviet aid mission would be compelled to flee China as Chiang and the anti-Communist sector of the GMD decimated the CPC, destroyed its mass organizations, and ejected it from the Chinese nationalist movement.

The decision to arm Chiang did contain elements of rationality. Documentation from the Soviet military mission reveals that the advisers in Guangzhou favored continued support for Chiang because they regarded him as an authentic nationalist who would advance the global anti-imperialist struggle, and because they believed that they could exert decisive influence on him and, through him, direct the Chinese nationalist movement. In the aftermath of Chiang's coup, their intention, presumably one shared by Borodin as representative of the Comintern, was to concili-

ate Chiang by political concessions, to manipulate him through his vanity and lust for power, and to surround him with the political influence of the left wing of the GMD—of which the CPC was a significant component.^[51]

For the decision to continue the "bloc within" strategy after Chiang had made evident his hostility to the CPC, Stalin and Bukharin have been blamed. When the disastrous consequences of the April-May 1926 decisions became obvious a year later, their China policy became the primary target of an attack launched by Trotsky, Zinoviev, and the United Opposition.^[52] However, the responsibility of Stalin and Bukharin does not date from the decisions of April-May 1926, which were in fact taken by the Politburo and the ECCI Presidium without substantial opposition from Trotsky and Zinoviev. Rather, their responsibility is linked to the fact that the two of them held to this policy, as we shall see, not only through the spectacular military successes of the Northern Expedition in July-October 1926 but also through the equally spectacular defeats inflicted on the CPC in 1927. Why did they do so?

European and American scholarship has relied on two lines of argument.^[53] One holds that the internal politics of the CPSU limited the policy alternatives available to Stalin and Bukharin. To wit, the most reasonable policy was to withdraw the CPC from the GMD and allow it to pursue an independent revolutionary strategy. This was the policy consistently advocated by a significant sector of the CPC leadership, including the founder and general secretary of the party, Chen Duxiu. However, this policy choice was politically unacceptable to Stalin and Bukharin because it was appropriated by Trotsky in the March to May 1926 period and then by the United Opposition as a whole from April through July 1927. According to this argument, Stalin was unable to "borrow" policies from his opponents for fear that doing so would disadvantage him in the struggle for leadership among Lenin's successors.

The second line of argument contends that Stalin would not have shifted course even if his policy choice had not been constrained by the leadership struggle. It asserts that the political strategies conceived by Lenin had a powerful and lasting influence on the political behavior of his successors, and on Stalin in particular. Lenin "taught" that the correct strategy for Communist parties in Asian anti-imperialist revolutions was support for the nationalist revolutionaries in "united fronts." From this revolutionary coalition, a "democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry" would emerge, and the proletariat would gain control of it. The "united front" would then terminate with the disposal of the non-Communist revolutionaries. In Stalin's words, Chiang Kai-shek would be used, "squeezed dry like a lemon, and then flung away."^[54] In Stalin's narrow vision and rigid

thought, there were no alternatives to these Leninist precepts. Thus, this line of argument emphasizes Stalin's ideological obedience, his lack of political imagination, and the cautiousness of his strategic thinking. To these may be added a corollary developed in pre-1985 Soviet scholarship: During the Chinese Nationalist Revolution, as at other crucial junctures in Soviet foreign relations (most notably in 1941), Stalin engaged in "wishful thinking" that left Soviet foreign policy unable to adjust quickly to rapid changes in the international situation.^[55]

However Soviet Russia's involvement in the conquest phase of the Chinese Nationalist Revolution was decided upon, it was initially rewarded. By October 1926, the NRA's expedition into central China was a military success, one in which Soviet military assistance played a significant role.^[56] Bliukher and his staff planned the general strategy, and during the military campaign Chiang made no strategic decisions without consulting him. Fifty-eight Soviet military advisers, with a technical staff of eighteen, were attached to specific NRA units. They planned operations, oversaw their execution, and gathered intelligence. Sometimes they led attacks. Soviet pilots acted as scouts, terrorized enemy troops, and dropped bombs on tactical targets. The flow of supplies and equipment from the USSR increased once the Northern Expedition was under way. By August, six Soviet ships traveled regularly from Vladivostok to Guangzhou loaded with oil, large and small arms, and disassembled aircraft. CPC political commissars accompanied the Nationalist armies; Zhou Enlei was attached to the elite First Division of the First National Republican Army. And CPC organizers followed the troops, founding farmers' organizations in the countryside and reorganizing labor unions in the cities.

The ECCI celebrated the victories in China at its Seventh Plenum in December 1926. In the words of the "Resolution on the China Question" adopted there, the Northern Expedition had "effectively wiped out imperialist rule from half of China" and brought the Chinese Revolution close to the point at which the proletariat, led by the Chinese Communist Party, could take control of it.^[57] The CPC was instructed not only to remain a "bloc within" the GMD, but also to enter the Nationalist government, which, the resolution maintained, contained the nucleus of a revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat, the peasantry, and the petty bourgeoisie. The primary task of the CPC was specified as leading the GMD and the Nationalist government leftward to a radical agrarian program in the newly liberated areas, a program that included arming the poor and middle peasantry and confiscating the land holdings of the warlords, the temples, and those gentry who opposed the revolution. The success of the revolution in China depended on this program, the resolution con-

cluded, and only the CPC could initiate it. European and American scholars have condemned these instructions as unimplementable and self-contradictory.^[58] In response, the leading official specialist during the Brezhnev era on the Asian policy of the Comintern defended them as reasonable, flexible, and empirically based.^[59] Subsequent research in archival Chinese sources has demonstrated that they undermined the efforts of Chen Duxiu to unify the CPC at the very moment he was on the verge of success.^[60]

Scholars of all political persuasions have conventionally understood that it was at the Seventh ECCI Plenum that the definitive Stalin-Bukharin China policy was formulated, pronounced, and imposed on the CPC. By this time the leadership of the United Opposition had been removed from all important offices in the government, the party, and the Comintern. In particular, Zinoviev had been removed as president of the ECCI in October and the office then abolished by Comintern resolution. In his place, Bukharin gave the opening address to the Seventh Plenum and reported that, despite capitalist stabilization, the world revolutionary process was moving forward along three paths—in Russia, in England, and in China. Three sessions of the plenum were set aside for discussion of the Chinese question. Stalin, who openly participated in the workings of the CI for the first time, delivered an address to the China commission in which he attempted to set out in theoretical terms the strategies then in operation in China.^[61] As conventionally understood, "The Resolution on the China Question" was the result of Stalin's decisive intervention, one that went without challenge from within the plenum.

This long-held belief was modified by research done in Soviet archives during perestroika .^[62] An investigation of the transcript of the proceedings of the plenum contained in the CPSU Central Archives reveals that considerable and heated debate on the issue of agrarian revolution in China took place. The resolution itself—the immediate authorship of which was previously attributed by some sources to Bubnov, Raskolnikov, and Voitinskii and by others to Pavel Mif, the Comintern expert on East Asian revolutionary movements, or to Bukharin and Roy^[63] —was actually formulated through the efforts of members of the CPC delegation to the ECCI Plenum, who were aided by Roy and Raskolnikov, both members of the CI Commission on China, and by William Gallacher, Dmitrii Manuilskii, and Sen Katayama, all members of the ECCI Presidium. Stalin's particular contribution to the deliberations was a proposal to add to the resolution a statement singling out the special role played by military conquest in the successes of the Chinese Revolution. This proposal was sharply criticized, and it was not incorporated in the resolution. Both Stalin and the ECCI

were thereby spared additional severe embarrassment when Chiang Kai-shek's allies deployed their armies against the CPC from April to July 1927.