I—
Introduction
This book is addressed to the question, How did the Chinese Communist revolution succeed? It covers a rather long span of time, roughly from 1934 to 1943, because during this time the winning strategy was formulated, applied, and the final victory was nearly assured. It seeks to answer several questions which are directly subsumed under the principal question. The scope of the book is broad, in spite of an unfortunate lack of important data and monographic studies, because of my belief in the need for an overview of the revolution which restores a proper perspective to the event. There is of course a need to simply know more. But researches that pertain to a part of the whole are no substitute for a speculation about the whole itself. The need for such an undertaking seems greater than ever today because of the subtle but pervasive influence which China exerts on those who study her.
The problem of perspective is doubly complicated in the case of China, for we are dealing with a revolution, and a rather unique one at that. As a revolution it set one half of the nation against the other. Inevitably, the victor and the loser offer totally different views of the struggle. This disparity should create no more difficulty for scholars than that in other revolutions. But the Chinese revolution took place in an intimate interaction with international conflict among the powers. The link between the war and the revolution was so close that the revolution itself can be regarded as unique on that account. Without the international conflict that engulfed China, as I shall maintain, the revolution could not have taken place. Hence, those who took part in the former took part in the latter as well. Among the international actors, accordingly, one can name Britain, Germany, Japan, the Soviet
Union, and the United States as having had direct involvement in the revolution.
For these nations to have distinct perspectives of their own on the revolution is understandable. But in the case of the United States in particular, its continued involvement in the civil war to this date created the need to choose between two accounts of the revolution, the victor's and the loser's. Answers to the question, How was China lost, were bound up with answers to the question, Who should rule China? We need not of course take seriously those who answer the former by first answering the latter. Still, the compulsion to see the past events within the framework of current politics and intellectual trend is strong. Thus today we repudiate the question, How was China lost, on the assumption that it was not America's to win or lose in the first place. In so doing, we assume that the revolution in China was moved solely by forces which were internal to itself and that there was no room for external forces to influence the course.[*]
There is one other source of political distortion in the study of the Chinese revolution. Hitherto we have been unaware of it, but it accounts by and large for the uncritical acceptance of the Chinese Communist Party's official history. I hope to show that the CCP's official version of the revolution was the result of a very intense internal struggle concerning different revolutionary strategies. What has been taken in the past for a more or less frank assessment of how the revolution was won from the victor's standpoint has been in fact a justification for one faction in the CCP.[1]
A multitude of participants and perspectives, however, can impede as well as facilitate our study. Out of the clash of opinions held by the victors and the losers—including those within the CCP itself—we may be able to arrive at a more balanced account of the revolution on our own. There is thus a need to re-examine the opinions, long since dis-
[*] Barbara Tuchman's celebrated book ends with this remark: "In the end China went her own way as if the Americans had never come." Stilwell and American Experience in China, 1911–1945 (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1970), p. 531. She does not ask whether the very extensive American involvement in China, which she documented, was well directed, or whether China went the way she did partly because the Americans were there.
[1] It is easier to realize that the CCP's official history cannot be taken at face value than to know that it is also a weapon in internal power struggle. In writing Red Star Over China (London: Victor Bollancz Ltd., 1937), Edgar Snow was consciously trying to introduce the little known Communist movement to the world outside. But he did not know that he was also used by Mao's faction against its opponents both in China and Moscow. See how Heinz Shippe, who disagreed with Snow, was rebuked by Mao, in Snow, Random Notes on Red China, 1936–1945 (Cambridge, Mass.: East Asian Research Center, Harvard University, 1971), pp. 20–22. Shippe, also unaware, was supporting the Comintern's line.
carded, held by the losers. Above all, there is a need for a comprehensive framework for our analysis which is not marred by partisan or international differences. Such a framework should transcend the conventional political divisions that existed in China at the time without losing sight of their contours. In this study the revolution in China will be viewed as a conflict between its cities and the countryside.
Let us first review the major issues raised by the Maoist Party history and by some of the existing Western works. In the Party's history, the period between 1937 and 1945 is called the period of "the war of resistance against Japan" and is distinguished from the revolutionary civil wars which preceded and followed it. There is agreement among all concerned that the CCP's resurgence as a power had to do with Japanese imperialism and the war of resistance in which the CCP took part. Both contemporaneously and after the fact, the CCP has been reluctant to stress the revolutionary aspect of this war for itself. Only the Kuomintang side makes the charge that the Communists were engaged in an attempt to overthrow the government while China was under foreign invasion. The gist of the CCP's own view is that its strenuous and unstinting efforts in the resistance induced the Chinese nation to switch its allegiance to itself. Yet Mao Tse-tung states that there was an anti-feudal aspect to the CCP's war efforts in addition to the anti-imperialist aspect.[2] The focal point of my inquiry is, Whether and to what extent was the war of resistance also a revolutionary war? That is, what was the relationship between the anti-imperialist, nationalistic aspect of the war and the anti-feudal, revolutionary, class character of the war? All the important questions that can be raised about the war revolve around this issue.
It was Mao's idea that the war of resistance was a "peasant war,"[3] and that it was fought by "encircling the cities from the countryside."[4] He did not make clear whether he was referring to China's war efforts as a whole or to those of the CCP alone. There is, however, a universal agreement that the Chinese Communist movement was a peasant movement. The pioneering work which established this notion and linked it with the person of Mao was Benjamin Schwartz's. The Maoist strategy, according to him, contained the following components: (1) the existence of a strong peasant mass base; (2) the existence of a strong Leninist party; (3) the existence of a strong Red
[2] Selected Works (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1967), II, 313.
[3] Ibid. , p. 287.
[4] This notion, clearly a corollary of the "peasant war" thesis, was stated in Lin Piao, "Long Live the Victory of People's War," in A. Doak Barnett, ed., China After Mao (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967), p. 241.
Army; (4) the control of a strategically located territorial base; and (5) the self-sufficiency of the base.[5] While speaking primarily of the civil war period, Professor Schwartz states that "the shift to the New Democracy line [during the war with Japan] involved no change in the basic Maoist strategy. . . . "[6] The notion that the "Maoist strategy" went through no major alteration from the civil war period to the resistance period originated in the official history of the CCP as rewritten after 1945. According to it, the CCP in Kiangsi was beset by two mistaken leaders, both " 'Left' opportunist" in character, who, from time to time, prevented the Party from acting on the correct rural strategy advocated by Mao. The Communists' inability to withstand the Kuomintang's encirclement campaign in 1934 is attributed to the errors of the anti-Maoists."[7] That defeat, we are told, was the price the Communists had to pay to awaken to the wisdom of Mao's line; and from the Tsunyi Conference of 1935—where Mao displaced his opponents in power—to Japan's defeat in 1945, the Party was victorious because of the rural line. Yet, can it be really said that the CCP had remained indifferent to what Schwartz defined as "Maoism" prior to the Tsunyi Conference? If not, that is, if the CCP was fully practicing the rural revolutionary line after 1928, what does its defeat in 1934 imply for Mao (or "Maoism")? In fact, did not the CCP radically alter its policy shortly after the Tsunyi Conference rather than continue to adhere to the policy of "peasant war"?
It is common knowledge that in 1937 the CCP had publicly promised to discard its policies of the civil war period in favor of the united front with the Kuomintang against Japanese imperialism. The importance of Chalmers Johnson's controversial work, now fully a decade old, lies in its recognition that the Chinese Communist movement was defeated in Kiangsi in 1934 and that this defeat had something to do with its shift in orientation in 1936 and 1937. Therefore, Johnson sought to explain the subsequent rise of Communist power in terms of factors which were absent in Kiangsi.[8] But in arguing that the
[5] Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958), pp. 189–190.
[6] Ibid. , p. 200. Richard C. Thornton has successfully challenged Schwartz with respect to the origin of "Maoism" but agrees with him that the CCP's line of the Sixth Congress remained valid during the war against Japan and the civil war that followed it. The Comintern and the Chinese Communists, 1928–1931 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1969), p. 30.
[7] Resolution on Some Questions in the History of Our Party, Selected Works (New York: International Publishers Company, 1965) (hereinafter cited as SW ), IV, 177–186.
[8] Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power, The Emergence of Revolutionary China, 1937–1945 (Stanford University Press, 1962). The importance of this comparative method can hardly be overstressed. My book amounts to another exercise in this method.
war had galvanized the peasants into patriotic resistance, he, too, confined his attention to the rural areas. Thus the united front between the Communists and the Kuomintang is virtually ignored. This trend continues to date.[9]
One can go on enumerating the instances of ambiguity and ambivalence—toward the resistance and the revolution—in the CCP's own account and in Western works which reflect it. It is apparent that clarity in the relationship between the resistance and the revolution is the key to understanding the CCP's victory. The paradigm of Chinese revolution must therefore include both the forces of anti-imperialist nationalism and of domestic class warfare.
My paradigm is an elaboration of Mao Tse-tung's favorite and apt characterization of China as a "semi-feudal" and "semi-colonial" country. This is an adaptation of a similar idea from Sun Yat-sen. Mao used the appellation "semi-colonial" to distinguish China from India, which he felt was entirely "colonial" under direct British rule. The terms "semi-colonial" and "semi-feudal"—or literally "half-colonial" and "half-feudal"—therefore have clear geographical denotation. A "half-colonial" and "half-feudal" country meant one in which one part was under colonial rule and the other under feudal rule. Neither Sun nor Mao spelled out what the obverse sides of the two parts were. But Mao's use of the concepts suggests plainly that the "colonial" half of China was modern in the bourgeois–democratic sense, while the "feudal" half was entirely "non-colonial," that is, independent of direct foreign rule. "After the Opium War of 1840 China gradually changed into a semi-colonial and semi-feudal society," states Mao.[10] He means that as the treaty ports were opened up, colonization and modernization proceeded simultaneously there. The distinction between two halves of China, therefore, is identical with the boundary that separated China's cities from the countryside.
The proposed paradigm charts the entire universe within which the Chinese revolution took place. It consists of several pairs of polarized categories which characterize the division between the cities and the countryside. The categories on each side are interrelated among themselves.
[9] It is commonplace to regard the New Fourth Army Incident of 1941 as virtually the end of the second united front. See Richard C. Thornton, China, the Struggle for Power, 1917–1972 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), pp. 115, 124. The only exception to this trend has been Lyman P. Van Slyke, Enemies and Friends: The United Front in Chinese Communist History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967).
[10] Selected Works , II, 309.
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The paradigm is intended to bridge a hiatus which exists in our understanding of the Chinese revolution. The hiatus is in the conceptualization of the revolution as consisting of two distinct stages, urban and rural. The term revolution is generally used rather inclusively to refer to political and social changes that have taken place in China since at least as early as the Republican Revolution of 1911 and up to contemporary times. This usage is common to the Kuomintang, the CCP, Chinese and Western scholars. The revolution thus covers a period of sixty years, a very long span of time. During the first thirty years or so, the social and political ferment was confined almost exclusively to China's treaty ports and other urban areas. The major protagonists were inhabitants of the cities. They included the traditional elites, their modern successors, the returned students, and the national bourgeoisie. Beside living in the cities, they were all literate. By virtue of their education, they took it upon themselves to act as natural leaders. A galaxy of figures of all political hues and ideologies vied with each other to effect changes in modern China. The founders of the Communist movement were all of urban extraction. During those first years of the revolution, the rural areas were virtually untouched by such ferment. The countryside was inert and immobile. Those who try to see modern ferment in the countryside during or prior to this period can do so only in areas contiguous to the cities.[11] Yet,
[*] I am indebted to Professor Philip A. Kuhn for this manner of defining the tradition in the rural areas. See Rebellion and Its Enemies in Late Imperial China: Militarization and Social Structure, 1796–1864 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970).
[11] Frederick Wakeman, Jr., Strangers at the Gate: Social Disorder in South China, 1839–1861 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966).
according to a well-established view, the revolution shifted its arena between the 1930s and the early 1940s. The revolution is thought to have turned away from the cities to the rural areas after the split between the Kuomintang and the CCP in 1927. Then the cities are thought to have become an arena of counter-revolution.[12] Hence, they are ignored in most accounts of the Yenan period of the revolution.
This is a misconception of the nature of the "National Revolution" of which Sun Yat-sen was the symbol. The force which animated it was nationalism; it was truly revolutionary against imperialism. The Kuomintang began to grow when it had successfully harnessed this force to its fortune. Insofar as a political movement could succeed in China's urban areas, it had to take this factor into account. The May Fourth Movement and the early Communist movement were no exceptions. Only secondarily did the leaders and the constituency of urban nationalism concern themselves with economic and social conditions of the rural areas. And the urban middle class, with strong blood ties to rural elites, placed a limit on the method of rural reform; violent insurrection was abhorred.
The split of 1927 did not remove the impulse of "National Revolution" from the Kuomintang. The coup was as much an expression of Chinese nationalism directed at Russian imperialism as it was an expression of the vested interests of the landlord class. The coup had an unfortunate effect in forcing the Communists to launch radical social reform in opposition to the Kuomintang. The latter was in turn compelled to give priority to destruction of Communist insurrection, i.e., to national unification.
The schism superimposed an ideological division on the objective division between the town and the country, and the cities continued to lead and dominate the rural areas. The cities were linked with what Lin Piao called the "cities of the world," the source of inspiration for the May Fourth Movement. They grew in population; acquired a larger body of the middle class (the national bourgeoisie), educated population (the petty bourgeoisie), and the working class; enjoyed an ever-expanding network of communication; and thrived on commerce and industry. These conditions conduced to a change in the political
[12] What kind of society China was in the 1930s and 1940s is an important question for this study, though I do not deal with it directly. It seems true enough that the Kuomintang went into a reaction after the experience of the first united front with the Communists. Still, it seems doubtful that it was a fascist dictatorship as Barrington Moore, for instance, maintains in Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), pp. 187–201. The reorganized Kuomintang always professed to be a dictatorship during the stage of tutelage. Mao's own view is that China was an "Asiatic" society and the Kuomintang a traditional dictatorship. See pp. 180–182, 187–188 below.
complexion of the cities. The potential for spontaneous mobilization grew. The common denominator of political movement remained nationalism. As Japanese imperialism emerged as the foremost enemy after the Mukden Incident, patriotic outbursts once again became the avocation of students and intellectuals; these outbursts were linked with economic interests of the national bourgeoisie against foreign competition. But the cities supported the Kuomintang's suppression of violent insurrections in the rural areas.
The Kuomintang government presided over this constituency and continued to grow so long as it met the mandate of nationalism. The backbone of its support were the financial elites and the middle class in the lower Yangtze valley and the officer corps graduated from the Whampoa Military Academy. At some point, the Nanking government shed the tradition of warlordism and became a modern government, a species distinct from all the other regional power centers. One may regard the currency reform of 1935 as the turning point. This reform freed the Kuomintang government from heavy reliance on grain tax and from the need to farm out tax source to its army. It grew modern in other respects as well. In spite of its profession of "tutelage," a synonym for one-party dictatorship, it was very much influenced by public opinion in the cities. More than any other regional power in China, it was bound to the vocal and articulate population that could bestow or withhold the Mandate of Heaven.[*]
As Chalmers Johnson correctly points out, the Communist movement in the Kiangsi period had little to do with nationalism. Its success stemmed almost entirely from factors which related to the "feudal" aspect of the hinterland and the presence of foreign imperialism. The political and sociological foundation of "Red political power" in the hinterland was explained by Mao in this way:
There are special reasons for this unusual phenomenon. It can exist and develop only under certain conditions.
First, it . . . can only occur in China which is economically backward, and which is semi-colonial and under indirect imperialist rule. For this unusual phenomenon can occur only in conjunction with another unusual phenomenon, namely war within the White regime . . . supported by imperialism from abroad. . . .[13]
It appears that the Communist movement could have continued growing indefinitely by drawing on the forces generated exclusively in the
[*] The Confucian doctrine that the emperor ruled with the sanction of heaven. When there was popular discontent with an emperor, he was thought to have forfeited his mandate, thereby opening the way for his own overthrow.
[13] Selected Works , I, 65.
rural areas—so long as there was a power vacuum created by "incessant wars" among warlords aligned with foreign powers.
The steady rise of the Kuomintang in the Decade of Nanking (1927–1937) could only mean the eventual doom of regionalism. However, both warlord regimes and colonial powers reacted in defense of status quo. Japan was particularly sensitive to the menacing implications of radical nationalism to its interests in southern Manchuria. In 1931 it pre-empted Manchuria rather than see it reintegrated into Republican China. Nanking's problem was compounded when its domestic rivals began to invoke anti-Japanese slogans to justify their separate existence. In 1932 the CCP, too, joined these regional groups with a formal declaration of war on Japan. But as long as it harassed the government's rear in every international crisis, the Kuomintang's policy of national unification as a precondition for resistance remained credible. Little did the Chinese Communists know then that Nanking's pressure against them would be deflected once again by Japanese intervention on an unprecedented scale shortly thereafter.
In the meantime, the Kuomintang refused to allow anything to get in the way of suppressing the Communist rebellion. After considerable difficulty, it finally succeeded in delivering a near-fatal blow on the revolutionary movement. The cities were more powerful than the countryside. The Kuomintang's military victory indicated that, for the rural revolution to grow, the forces generated in the cities had to be politically neutralized. Any arrangement to attain this end had to draw on the nationalistic impulse that animated the cities. The CCP had learned the critical weakness of its exclusively rural orientation, and once again it turned toward the cities. This is the meaning of the second united front. Neither the defeat of the Communist movement in Kiangsi, nor its success during the war against Japan, therefore, can be adequately explained unless the cities—exogenous to the peasant revolution—are included in the paradigm.
My main thesis is, briefly, that the Communist victory in the "war of national liberation" followed from the fortuitous circumstances which made it possible to combine the war of resistance with a full scale revolution. The CCP's own power rested on mobilized peasantry. The mobilization was impossible unless it was preceded by a thorough-going land revolution. In order to neutralize the Kuomintang against peasant revolution, a protracted international conflict which subjected China to a foreign occupation was necessary. Japan's invasion enabled the Communist forces to move in behind the enemy lines. This was the most important strategic decision. It effectively ended the perennial threat of the Kuomintang's encirclement and suppression. The Com-
munists' partisan (or revolutionary) interest in expanding their armed forces became indistinguishable from national interest in the resistance. By championing the cause of resistance, the CCP sought to marshal the patriotic public opinion of the cities to keep the Kuomintang in the war; this, in turn, granted immunity to the revolutionary expansion of Communist power.
To maintain, as I do, that the second united front was of paramount importance for the success of the revolution necessarily implies a high estimate of the bearing of foreign intervention on the outcome. The criterion for judging the impact of foreign intervention on Chinese events should not be the subjective intent of the powers—such as Japan's design to subjugate the Kuomintang or American desire to support it. Foreign intervention should be judged objectively in the light of the question: did it help or hinder the maintenance and preservation of the second united front? When looked at this way, both the United States and Japan must be said to have played important positive roles in the revolution. The rivalry or "contradiction" between these and other powers constituted the outer framework of the revolution in China.
By discarding the paradigm of the Chinese revolution which views the rural areas in isolation, we are compelled to take new stock of the presuppositions that underlie that paradigm. One of these concerns the source of Communist power. The prevailing view is that it is based on "self-reliance," that is, created entirely in the rural areas. This view results from the fallacy of ignoring the function of the second united front in protecting the revolution during the stage of its infancy and growth. It is connected with the assumption that the CCP's activities during the resistance did not include revolution-making . By removing these misconceptions, it is possible to arrive at a correct assessment of the nature and strength of China's peasantry and the sources of Communist power. This is the secondary goal of my book.
As the Chinese revolution in the 1937–1945 period consisted of a combination of anti-imperialist and anti-feudal struggles, so my account of it falls into two rather distinct parts. One deals with the Communist leadership's efforts to adapt itself to the war between China and Japan. The other deals with the peasant revolution in rural areas which fell to the CCP's control.
The book draws on internal documents issued by the CCP in order to look at the revolution from the standpoint of the revolutionaries. In a movement which was Caesaro–Papist in nature, the internal policy debate was bound up with the question of the political power of various contenders. The Party's history as we have it now—the
source of so much confusion—was an instrument of internal struggle. To understand the substantive policy questions involved, we must understand the power interest of the contenders. But this book is not a history of the internal politics of the CCP. I will deal with that subject only insofar as it is indispensable for an understanding of the revolution in China.