This was a talk I gave as part of a weekly meeting of the Bath branch of the Revolutionary Communist Party.
Yes, so I picked the Chinese revolutions because, as part the Classics Volume 1 reading group, we were covering the Transitional Program, and Trotsky spent a paragraph talking about the nefariousness of the Third International in regards to how it “assisted" in the Chinese stormy mass upsurge, as he puts it, in 1925-27. He was talking about the Canton uprising, the Sino-Japanese War. We will get into all that in a little bit, but at the time, I basically had no idea what he was talking about. So yes, a few weeks ago I said oh yeah, I can cover the Chinese Revolution. And about 90 seconds into my research I thought oh my God, what have I done? But we're all good, so not to worry.
And so just for newer members, this is kind of why we do the lead offs. Yes, in part they do take the form of a traditional lecture, where you have an educator and audience. But it's also about the individual branch member who's giving the talk, providing them with a task where they can identify a blind spot, or an area of interest, develop their knowledge, their analysis, their understanding of Marxism, and to practice giving a talk as well. And to be clear, I'm fully expecting the content of what I'm about to say to be known already by quite a few people here, but that's absolutely, fine, as it will lead to a richer political discussion later.
But more broadly, I think the subject of China is relevant and applicable to all of us. On the one hand, in the world-perspectives document, we're talking about the relative decline of US imperialism when compared to China. So it's important to understand the origins of what is this now great power in a multipolar world, and how Communism played a role in that. But also for the Bath branch specifically, we do get quite a lot of Chinese tourists in this city as well so, we have a responsibility to have a passing knowledge of Communist China, and be able to answer a lot of the sort of bad faith questions about Mao, and that sort of thing. There's a lot of people who still think China is Communist to this day, for example, it's our job to address stuff like that at least on the stalls, especially. There were also a lot of things the Chinese Communists did wrong, which you can try and spot, that means there are a lot of lessons to be learned from this period of history.
Okay, so the history of China is very long and multifaceted, but we can broadly say that until the 19th century, you had a small nobility class, in the form of dynastic families, led by an Emperor, you had an educated layer of bureaucracy below that, you had a small kind of artisanal class, but the base of class society were the millions of peasants working on sort of small, independent farms, basically.
Now, as a nation state, China had a very isolationist set of policies, where they were self-sufficient, and had very little contact with the outside world. This was driven by a combination of factors like perceived threats, a desire to maintain internal stability, but also cultural superiority. By the 1800s however, this left them very vulnerable to imperialism. The first major example of this is British Imperialism in the form of the opium trade. We can see this as the British kind of prising open China for exploitation, to satiate the needs of domestic, overproduction, and this leads to the opium wars which were conflicts arising from China trying to reject western trade being forced upon them, but they were kind of vastly outgunned by Britain and by some extent France, and China was forced to open its doors economically, quite literally through gunboat diplomacy.
This contributed to what is known as the century of humiliation in China, where you have the “scramble for China” amongst the major powers at the time, carving the country up into its own spheres of influence. Amongst the European powers you also have Japan who decisively defeat China in the First Sino-Japanese war ending in 1895. And so these imperialist powers were exempt from local laws, had exclusive mining and railroad rights, territories and ports were no longer under the control of local government.
And this all, sought to stoke, for the first time really, a sense of nationalism amongst the peasant class, who up until now, didn't have a huge amount of class conciseness, no “us and them” mindset. But the clear brazenness and aggression of the foreign presence in China firmly ignites tensions at the local level. In 1899 you even had the Boxer Rebellion, where hundreds of thousands of workers in northern China revolted in response to these tensions, including the presence of Christian missionaries and the privileges they had that the locals were forced to accept. This rebellion was defeated by an alliance of eight different (supposedly rival) great powers. And I think that represents the clear interests of the imperialist ruling classes when it came to China. So yes, coming into the 1900s, and China is ripe, it's pregnant with social change.
And so in 1911, these forces of anti-imperialism amongst the lower classes, coupled with the weakness of the Chinese ruling class and their failed reforms, following a decade of various other revolts and uprisings, lead to a revolution that ousted the last dynasty of China, the Quing dynasty. However, these revolutionaries weren't Communist, and they weren't sure on what type of government China should have, and so after the revolution, you had this provincial government in place, and the outed emperor of China, for example, was allowed to stay in his palace. And so while the revolution was ostensibly a victory for the peasants, the labourers, it speaks to the lack of proper revolutionary leadership that a workers' state was not implemented. Following 1911, the ruling class was made up of the bureaucratic layer from the days of the Chinese empire, who become the new bourgeoisie. This “revolution” then was nothing more than really a change in personnel at the top of society, instilling quite an unstable provincial government initially. Nevertheless, this still was the founding of the Republic of China, cementing the collapse of thousands of years of dynastic rule.
In 1916 however, the first president of the Republic of China died. This president had actually seized power, proclaimed himself as the new emperor, and so a lot of the 1911 revolutionaries fled to Japan. And the resulting power vacuum kicked off what is known as the Warlord Era of China, where the country was carved into spheres of influence by military strong-men.
The year after, It's worth noting that the leader of the revolutionary forces, Sun Yat-Sen, does regroup, and resurrects this rival-government force called the Guomindang, and is able to establish legitimacy in the south east of China basically. Although, the “3 Principles” of this government are “Nationalism, Democracy, and livelihood of the people”, which may give you a clue into their class leanings, shall we say, which we'll discuss in a bit.
But yes, a couple of years later, you obviously had the culmination of World War I, now a lot of Chinese citizens were hoping, that as the treaty of Versailles was sort of re-carving up the world, that China would be able to obtain concessions from these weakened states to kind of unshackle itself from the continued imperialist projects which were sucking the country dry, subverting its internal class relations. That didn't happen, the Chinese government was still too weak, and so anti-imperialist tensions rise to the surface again and you did have a series of uprisings, collectively known as the May 4th movement, which involved thousands of students.
Of course, these same students and intellectuals, in the year prior have watched the Russian Revolution occur, Bolshevism win out just across the border, demonstrating the power of Communist ideas, and strong working class leadership. This had a profound effect of consciousness on the Chinese youth and workers. In 1919 the Soviet government also relinquished territories that the Tsarist government had stolen from China in the past, and this too had a large effect on the Chinese, especially in contrast with how the western states were still exploiting China. And so out of all this, a number of Chinese revolutionaries formed the Chinese Communist Party in 1921, with the help of the Comnitern at the time.
The Chinese Communist Party experienced rapid growth. The development of the Chinese proletariat was still in its early stages, and so it helped to form pretty much all of the mass trade unions in the country. Imperialism had meant the most advanced manufacturing techniques were imported into the country, cementing the creation of the proletariat, but in the same vein, the most advanced socialist ideas of the time were being imported too.
In 1925, the Chinese Communist Party arranged a series of strikes on the grounds of anti-imperialism, where you had foreign owned factories in the country, there were colonial police forces too. And that all came to a head when workers protesting against Japanese factories were shot dead by British police. And as you can imagine, this kind of set off a whole storm of mass strikes and mass discontent, and this led to a general strike.
Now with the party being only four years old at this point, the membership didn't have the mastery of Marxism required to truly act as a vanguard. Now in theory, that shouldn't have been a problem, they can just call up the Comintern, and seek guidance, seek the necessary personnel to further the revolution and establish a dictatorship of the proletariat. Unfortunately by 1925 you're calling up the Comintern and it's Stalin on the other end.
So just to have a little aside here, in order to explain the actions that the Comintern took, we have to quickly go into Stalinism. This includes the policy of “socialism in one country”, which evolved out of the failed European revolutions of the 1917 to 1923, that the success of world socialism was predicated on the survival of the Soviet Union, and so the idea of permanent revolution was abandoned. This grew out of Stalin's entrenchment of the bureaucracy within the Soviet Union, and the subsequent desire that the outcome of any organic Communist Revolutions in other countries should be that of a similarly bureaucratised, degenerated workers' state.
So this meant the Comintern position on the 1925 Chinese revolution mirrored that of Menshivism, there must be a two stage revolution, one first led by the bourgeoisie, the working class should not have a role in this first revolution - they weren't competent enough, they weren't to be trusted. So, the official line was that, in this time of instability, the Chinese Communist Party should align themselves with Sun Yat-Sen and the Guomindang, who were progressives, but were still bourgeois and nationalist. And as I mentioned earlier, were currently in a very weakened position.
But fundamentally, this alliance of the Chinese communist party and the Guomindang was never going to work. It was the forced pairing of a revolutionary workers party, and a reformist bourgeois project. They represented different classes so there was always going to be a contradiction there. And the Guomindang constantly played a counterrevolutionary role, whenever there was agitation, a strike, a protest, a boycott of imperial goods, these endeavours were never given support, and always defeated. The Guomindang even banned any incoming members from the Chinese Communist Party from voicing any criticism of them, which speaks to the power dynamics, being imposed from the Comintern, who are always pleading to keep this coalition of opposing forces together.
And so following the death of Sun Yat-Sen in 1925, there was another power struggle, this time between the Left and Right factions of the Guomindang. And over the course of about a year I think, there were assassinations, arrests, demotions, exiles, and eventually the one of the senior military men, won out by means of a small coup. This leader, Chiang Kai-shek, came from very much the right of the party, and on ascent to power, Stalin gave in to his demands of a reduced Communist presence in the party, in order to maintain Soviet influence. At the time, Chiang Kai-shek was preparing to launch the “Northern Expedition” which was a military campaign to eradicate all of those warlords that I mentioned, previously who had kind of been running pretty much the entire north of China, in various pockets, over the preceding decade. This predicated the creation of the National Revolutionary Army, which a united from of both Communists and the Guomindang.
We also need to quickly mention the political situation of Shanghai, where impressively you know, the trade unions in collaboration with the Chinese Communist party, through militant strikes, had basically bought the city to a standstill, and workers had started running the sort of socially necessary parts of the city. This was true uprising of the proletariat in China's largest city, essentially implementing a Soviet, - really significant for the time - and could have absolutely spread to other cities, achieving a real dictatorship of the proletariat. When this Northern Expedition reached Shanghai however, in an example of the disastrous role that Stalin had during that era, he impressed upon the workers to lay down their arms, make way for the incoming National Revolution Army, and ceed power to them, allowing Chiang Kai-shek to reestablish power there very easily. And despite the alliance between the Guomindang and the Communists, Chiang Kai-shek saw the power of the Communists in Shanghai as a threat, especially since they outnumbered his forces.
And spurred on by the coup he'd just pulled off in the months prior, with no-one to check his power really, Chiang Kai-shek, enacted a purge, by enlisting criminal gangs it should be said. This newly formed militia, assisted by nationalist sympathising troops of the NRA, carried out the slaughter of between 5,000 and 10,000 Communists on a single day. This virtually destroyed the Chinese Communist Party and the workers' movement in what was China's largest city. The purge spread out, and was conducted in other cities that were under Chiang Kai-shek's control as well. The total death toll eventually went into the hundreds of thousands most likely. This is known as the Shanghai Massacre, so this basically marks the start of the Chinese Civil War between the CCP and the Guomindang. Later in the year you did have a series of CCP uprisings, namely the Canton uprising, and the Nanching uprising - the last of these saw the founding of what would be the People's Liberation Army too.
The impact of this purge was obviously significant, this united front predictably fell apart. Stalin's response to all this was that the Communists should regroup and form their own sort of guerrilla army. However the left-wing of the now-split Guomindang, got word of this, and expelled all Communist and Comintern members from the party. Now I'll skip over a little bit here, but Chiang Kai-shek asserted his power, basically defeated the rest of the warlords, the left wing-faction of the Guomindang gave in, and so in 1928 you finally had a unified China again for the first time in over 10 years. The Guomindang was a recognised government around the world and China embarked on a decade of modernisation and national reconstruction.
So the Communists, after being massacred, basically, flee into the countryside, now as part of the People's Liberation Army.
But the events of the failed 1925 to 1927 revolution set the tone of the civil war so we don't need to go too in-depth on the war itself, but broadly the PLA would rarely engage in direct confrontation with the Guomindang, they were often outnumbered and outgunned, so guerrilla tactics were paramount. And the chief military planner on the Communist side was Mao, who over the course of the war proved to be a tremendous military strategist. In 1934, however, the Guomindang outmanoeuvred them, and forced the PLA on the run. And this is known as the long March, 100,000 communist troops walked 6000 miles and 92,000 of them died. And this probably would've meant their defeat, but in 1937 the second Sino Japanese war started, being one of the first theatres of World War II. And so the Chinese Civil War was basically put on pause, both sides agreed that it was best to face down the Japanese as a united front. And for the time being they put their differences aside. And that speaks to the anti-imperialist thread that runs throughout the entirety of this era.
Now, before I go on, I should explain that throughout the entire history of the Chinese Communist Party, they never had revolutionary aims. This Stalinist line, of working with the bourgeoisie nationalist government, was a constant, in the minds of the Chinese Communist. Mao thought this stuff too, and so every turn in the Civil War, the Communists were always pushing for a resolution, an agreement. They did not see it as their job to truly overthrow the capitalist government. And we see this in the truce of the Sino of Japanese war, the CCP sent their soldiers to the government for use in combat, essentially giving soldiers over to the enemy. And Chiang Kai-shek, at every opportunity, basically went back on his word, and betrayed any agreements with the Communists. In 1947, it was Chiang Kai-shek who broke the terms of the truce and restarted the Civil War. As a bourgeois nationalist, he could not stand the very existence of a Communist party, with thousands of thousands of members, who were armed, had control of territory - he wasn't gonna put up with that. Nonetheless, you think it would be the Communists who would want to resume the fighting, against a weakened government. So despite the efforts of the CCP, negotiations inevitably broke down between the two sides.
So the Civil War starts back up in 1947, but by 1949, it's lost by an American backed, more technologically advanced, Chiang Kai-shek, so why is that? So it's a question which has two sides, on the one hand, you had huge problems from trying to rehabilitate the economy from the areas that were occupied by Japan during what was a hugely destructive second Sino-Japanese war. The economy was in a terrible state, in part due to corruption in the form profiteering, speculation, and hoarding by the ruling class. The question of food security in China still hadn't been solved, so you had mass starvation in the wake of the war, and millions were rendered homeless by floods too. And they were actually huge student movements in response to this stuff, which does demonstrate that a proletariat, bolshevik style revolution should have been possible at the time, but as I've said, that was not the policy of the CCP or the Comintern.
On the military side of this civil-war question, what the US imperialists and Chiang Kai-shek failed to realise was that the most effective weapon in the civil war wasn't necessarily guns and bombs etc., but propaganda. The PLA promised the landless, starving peasants that by fighting for them, these peasants would be able to seize farmland from their landlords. Chiang Kai-shek's army was made up of these same peasants who were rounded up from the villages, tied up, and kidnapped - which we're seeing in Ukraine today, actually. These soldiers were underpaid, underfed, thirsty, forced to walk hundreds of miles. So many died or fled before they even got to any kind of training base. The PLA would also leave plots open for any deserters from Chiang Kai-shek's army. This proved to be hugely effective. Chiang's army had probably the highest rate of desertion of any army in history. This meant that despite suffering heavy casualties, the PLA was able to keep fighting, with a constant supply of fresh recruits.
Military leaders would also overreport their recruitment numbers to get more money, and so this 5-1 numbers advantage of troops on paper, in reality, didn't really exist, there was relative parity between these fighting forces. You also have to remember the Japanese invasion of China during the second war really plunged the government into chaos, and actually, at the end of the second world war, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan, invaded Manchuria, a part of China that Japan had control over. The Soviet Union captured that area, and also 700,000 weapons, which they gave to the CCP. So in 1948 the Red Army were able to transition to positional warfare, where they were taking cities. There were so many defections from the Guomindang that this became quite easy by this point. The Guomindang, and about 2 million nationalists, actually fled to Taiwan, where the Guomindang is still in power today, and that's why Taiwan is no longer part of China, and China covets Taiwan so much as well.
So very quickly, for the first few years of rule by the Chinese Communist party, they still didn't abolish capitalism, they kept it around. And it only took a counter-revolution from the bourgeoisie, and extensive American blockade, and the fallout from the Korean War, and the domestic economy being absolutely wrecked too. So they were forced to adopt the proper appropriation of the means of production and state planning. The CCP was really dragged, kicking and screaming to be like proper socialist. That said, it still wasn't a dictatorship of the proletariat, it was a top down, bureaucratic, Stalinist project. Although it was still transformational for the country. From 1953 to 1958: wages rose by a third, life expectancy increased from 36 to 57, the number of children in school doubled, there was a massive building of social housing, they granted land reform, and granted women transformational rights. There were also mistakes, like the Great Leap Forward, but that was allowed to occur precisely because of the top-down, anti-democratic, bureaucratic, nature of China at the time. And the lack of a proper workers' democracy is why Capitalism has been ultimately allowed to be restored.
Okay, that was a lot, I'm aware. But I'm hoping, if I've done my job correctly at all, that kind of 1850 to 1950 century of China has become a bit more demystified. Because it is messy, it is chaotic, and actually you do have a lot of, kind of, extenuating circumstances which mean that China's revolution's can be difficult to interpret. You have the importing of advanced industry into China due to imperialism, you have the rule of this under-developed bourgeois nationalist class, you have Stalinist interventions at times of agitation, and you have World War II, which meant that America couldn't intervene as much as it usually does. And it eventually culminates in the victory of this peasant army. So it can be overwhelming, and this is why I mentioned at the start, that I was, initially, overwhelmed.
But actually, it speaks to the testament of dialectical materialism, that even something as “chaotic” as this period of Chinese history, if you understand it from a class perspective, understand that contradictions are inherent to the push and pull of history, then actually, it becomes reasonably clear. The motivations and interests of each class are apparent: the peasants, the nationalists, the imperialists, the stalinists, and how the contradictions between this classes fuel quantitive changes and eventually burst open, ushering in qualitative change. You understand the class character of the revolution, and why it succeeded.
As Marxists, and Communists, we are able to have such a high level of clarity, through these ideas, compared to our political opponents, allowing us to explain how the world really works to anyone that is interested. In educating others, we can lift their class conciseness, make them see where they sit in society, that they sit as part of an oppressed class. Dialectical Materialism continues to be this ace in our back pocket that we can use to really make sense of the world. And to change the world, which we will, you first need to understand it.