In late December 1921, Maring met with Sun Yat-sen to propose an alliance between the KMT and the CCP. While Sun did not dismiss the proposal outright he was more interested in Maring’s suggestion that the KMT could be re-organised along ‘Russian’ lines as a disciplined, centrally-controlled party, and a KMT military academy be established by the Soviet Army. However, Maring’s proposal that the CCP join the KMT was met by the almost universal opposition of the CCP members.[2]
On 13 January 1922, some 30,000 Hong Kong seamen struck for union recognition and a pay increase to bring their pay more into line with that of Europeans. The Hong Kong seamen held out for eight weeks in a bitter and bloody struggle. The British imperial authorities in Hong Kong were finally forced to raise wages by 20-30%, lift the ban on the Seamen’s Union, release arrested workers, and indemnify the families of the martyrs. The crews of the Yangtse steamers went on strike soon afterwards for two weeks and also won victory.[3] This successful strike by seamen in Hong Kong was an inspiration to all those working to unionise labour.
The strike had been led by KMT militants and publicly supported by individual leaders of the KMT. The CCP participated in, and actively aided, the strike and this raised its prestige enormously but the strike demonstrated that the CCP was not yet in the same league as the KMT even within unionised labour.[4] It is claimed that as many as 12,000 sailors from Canton, Hong Kong and Swatow joined the KMT as a result.[5] It was on the basis of this strike that Maring convinced the ECCI that the KMT had serious and important links with working class organisations and understood the need for mass action in support of the anti-imperialist struggle.
This was certainly not true at the top of the KMT but Maring believed that the loose structure of the KMT made it easy for the CCP to enter the KMT, convince its left wing of the need for mass action in support of the nationalist struggle, win a majority and change the composition of the KMT. CCP members within the KMT would educate so-called ideologically independent elements who would eventually be recruited into the CCP, and use KMT contacts to organise caucuses within the trade unions. The discussions within the CCP were over whether, if it entered the KMT, it could maintain its own identity and establish its own independent activity amongst the workers.[6] The majority of the CCP leadership opposed any agreement which did not meet these Leninist conditions.
In March/April 1922, Chen wrote to the ECCI insisting:
“in any struggle which we may take up or any combination we may make with other parties, we must always show our true face to the masses. Furthermore, we must maintain our complete independence in any arrangement we may make in a United Front.”[7]
He would receive short shrift at the 4th World Congress where he would be accused of ultra-leftism.
However, it turned out that Chen Jiongming opposed Sun’s scheme, and in 1922 Sun had to flee to Shanghai where he once again sought support from Canada, Germany, Great Britain, the United States, and even Manchurian warlords. They all refused. The Western powers were too attached to their special privileges to support a united independent China. At this critical moment Voitinsky visited Sun. Sun’s situation and that of the KMT had changed radically since Maring’s visit the previous December and now Sun welcomed collaboration with the Soviet Union even if it meant some form of unity with the CCP.[8]
At the 1st National Congress of the CCP it had been decided to establish a Trade Union Secretariat. This soon became the most important undertaking of the Party. In May 1922, on the back of the Hong Kong strike, it organised the First National Labour Conference in Canton which was attended by 160 delegates claiming to represent 300,000 union members.[9] The CCP was now very active in building trade unions, for example, in September 1922 Li Lisan would lead the Anyuan miners to an important victory; the gains included recognition of the union (it claimed 11,000 members), foremen no longer allowed to physically beat workers, and no withholding of wages as a punishment.[10]
CCP Members approached the 2nd National Congress (16-23 July 1922) with great confidence. Present were nine delegates representing about 123 members.[11] Prominent among the delegates were Communists who had recently returned from participation in the First Congress of the Toilers of the East held in Moscow and Petrograd, and with their support, the CCP Congress adopted a manifesto which endorsed a United Front with the KMT while warning that “workers must not become an appendage of the petty bourgeoisie … but must fight for their own class interests.”[12] This was fully in accord with Lenin’s guidance given in his Draft Theses on the National and Colonial Question.[13]
At the 2nd World Congress, Maring had heard Lenin define the British Labour Party – a party founded by the trade unions to protect the trade unions and composed largely of workers – as “a thoroughly bourgeois party.”[14] Lenin insisted a party had to be judged by the men who led it and its actions. The British Labour Party was an organisation of the bourgeoisie which existed to systematically dupe the workers. By Lenin’s criteria, the KMT was a bourgeois party.
However, prior to the 2nd Congress of the CCP, Maring had attended the ECCI meeting of 17 July 1922 and presented a report describing the KMT as a national-revolutionary movement; a bloc of intellectuals, liberal democratic bourgeoisie, petty bourgeoisie, and workers. Maring proposed the CCP enter the KMT even if this meant joining the KMT as individuals; and then find ways of preserving their independence and organisation. Zinoviev and the ECCI endorsed this new strategy and sent a message to the CCP ordering it to move its HQ to Canton and to carry out its work “in contact with” (i.e. under the supervision of) Maring.[15]
Maring took the United Front proposal to Sun Yat-sen who stubbornly insisted that CCP members would be allowed to join the KMT only as individuals who had to abide by its rules; a United Front of equals was out of the question – a condition that Maring and the ECCI had already accepted, but the CCP leaders had not.
Adolph Joffe, later to be a leading Left Oppositionist, was in China heading a Soviet diplomatic mission. After meeting Sun Yat-sen he wrote to Moscow in July 1922:
Support the Chinese Communist Party even more than Sun Yat-sen, … Irrespective of the weakness of this party, regard its complete independence as necessary, and the efforts of certain agents of the ECCI to fuse this organisation with the party of Sun Yat-sen as completely incorrect.[16]
There was stiff and universal opposition to Maring’s proposal within the Central Committee of the CCP on the grounds that joining the KMT as individuals would curb the independence of the CCP. The CC argued that any alliance with the KMT should be temporary, based on specific issues, and include the continuing independence of the two parties. Maring called the members of the CC to a meeting on 17 August 1922 at which he strongly argued that the KMT was the “only serious national-revolutionary group” in China, that it was not a party of the bourgeoisie but a “strong national revolutionary political party with members in all strata of Chinese society.” Maring argued that the proletarian party should join the KMT in order to advance the revolution; that a small weak party such as the CCP could enormously and quickly expand its membership and influence if it entered the KMT. It took two days of argument and, ultimately, the threat of expulsion from the CI before the CC agreed to accept the ECCI instructions to join the KMT.[17] As a face-saver it was agreed that the matter would be raised again at the next Congress of the CCP.
The discussions between Chen, Maring, and the KMT took place between the 3rd and 4th World Congresses, both of which were concerned with advancing the United Front strategy. Thus, the discussions within the CCP were couched in terms of a United Front, but that was not what was being proposed for China. A United Front was a temporary alliance between independent parties for specific goals, but here was a strategy in which CCP members entered the KMT and worked within it subject to KMT discipline for an unspecified period to achieve goals set by the KMT.[18] For Communists with little experience of any kind of political work the bloc within carried serious dangers. The organisation of the Party had to change to match that of the KMT; there were limits on what the CCP could publicly say or do. The CCP both formally and informally was being tied into relationships with members of the KMT and tempted to make all kinds of concessions to be accepted and, possibly worse of all, the major work being undertaken by many if not most CCP members was to build KMT branches, often from scratch. There was a real danger of these inexperienced and untested CCP members adapting to the KMT, and of alien ideologies finding their way into the CCP.
Maring met Sun on 25 August 1922 in the French concession in Shanghai and the terms of the collaboration were endorsed, i.e. Sun again refused a United Front on equal terms but would accept Soviet and ECCI assistance. Soviet military and financial assistance would begin arriving the following summer.[19]
On 4 September 1922 (coincidentally the day four CCP leaders symbolically joined the KMT as individual members), Sun Yat-sen announced his intention to reorganise the KMT with a tighter discipline. The plans for a new programme and constitution had been drawn up by a committee headed by Maring and Chen Duxiu.[20]
The 4th World Congress of the CI (7 November – 3 December 1922) examined the national-revolutionary movements in the Far East, and the United Front strategy was approved as part of the Theses on the Eastern Question. The CI gave its support to any genuinely revolutionary national movement against imperialism in the colonial and semi-colonial countries; but before joint actions the Communist Party had to establish itself as an independent factor and only after its complete political autonomy had been secured could it make temporary agreements with revolutionary bourgeois democratic forces. The theses were at pains to point out that in the so-called backward countries, the struggle for the land was a key element in the revolutionary national liberation struggle against imperialism.[21]
The Congress received a report from the Chinese delegate to the effect that the CCP was establishing an anti-imperialist United Front with the revolutionary nationalist party: “The form of the united front is that we enter (the KMT) in our individual names and capacities.” Instead of the Congress reminding the CCP that it was “absolutely unacceptable” to enter any arrangement which restricted the freedom of the CCP to criticise and agitate, the Congress was treated to Radek (session leader and supporter of the bloc within) pronouncing that social and economic development in China was so backward that not even a national republic was on the order of the day.[22] The prestige of the Russian leaders was so high that when Radek spouted this nonsense (the Chinese Revolution which had overthrown the emperor and established a republic had taken place eleven years previously, the anti-imperialist May 4th Movement which radicalised an entire generation of workers and students had exploded three years previously), no-one spoke up to contradict him. Instead Chen Duxiu was upbraided for ultra-leftism for arguing for a politically-independent CCP.
At the 4th World Congress, the machinery of the centre was considerably strengthened with an enlarged ECCI scheduled to meet once every four months with a Presidium, on the pattern of the Russian Politburo. Lenin had generally played an important part – in many cases, the decisive part – in the decision-making process[23] but with Lenin increasingly incapacitated, weakness at the centre combined with the weaknesses in the leaderships of the national Communist Parties would prove fatal in Bulgaria, Germany, Estonia and … China.
Opposition in the CCP remained so strong that in early January 1923, Zinoviev took the matter before the Politburo of the Russian Party where, following Lenin’s death, he was in an unholy alliance with Stalin and Kamenev, and gained its approval for the “bloc within” (Trotsky voted against). On that basis he drafted a resolution approved by the ECCI on 12 January 1923 justifying the desirability of “co-operation” between the CCP and the KMT.[24] Zinoviev may have honestly considered the bloc within to be the most appropriate tactic for building the CCP and developing the national democratic revolution but there was a sleight-of-hand in the ECCI resolution which designated the KMT as a “group” and this allowed the authors to emphasise its multi-class membership. The text of the resolution referred to the KMT as a party only in quotation marks and in this way the document avoided having to define the class nature of the KMT as bourgeois. The policy Zinoviev was proposing for China reflected the class-collaboration he had shown in October 1917.
The resolution re-affirmed the central task for China as the national revolution against imperialism, repeating that the KMT was the only serious national revolutionary group so the activities of the KMT and CCP should be co-ordinated. The members of the CCP were to remain within the KMT and avoid conflict with it as long as it maintained an “objectively correct” policy. The CCP was supposed to preserve its own organisation and apparatus and not lose its identity within the KMT, “not furl its own banner”. The CCP was instructed to work independently and openly to create trade unions and lay the foundations for a strong mass Communist Party, but how it could do so while its members were limited by KMT discipline was not described.
Implicit in the ECCI resolution was the assumption that the Chinese national revolution would be a self-contained stage in which the national bourgeoisie remained steadfastly anti-imperialist with the CCP playing a supportive role. Ignored was the possibility that the bourgeoisie might have stronger links with the imperialists than the proletariat and peasantry, and align themselves accordingly. In the event, the Chinese national democratic revolution – just as in Russia in 1917 – would have to be carried through against the national bourgeoisie. The CCP would have to choose capitulation or conflict. Pressure from the ECCI ensured it furled its banner.
Inspired by the First National Labour Conference, enthusiastic railway workers attempted to unionise North China. During 1922-23 strikes took place on all the trunk lines with CCP members playing a leading role. On 7 February, the warlord Wu Pei-fu ordered his troops onto the railway stations in Hankou (part of the Wuhan complex) where they opened fire on the strikers. Sixty railwaymen were killed and the strike collapsed. This became known as the February 7th Massacre.[25] This failure of a CCP-led trade union initiative was used by Maring to justify his argument that the CCP was not yet strong enough to go-it-alone and needed the KMT. With the defeat of the strike there was widespread persecution of militants but trade union organisation recovered surprisingly rapidly, and by 1925 the number of unionised workers had reached 570,000, and a year later had risen to 1,023,000.[26]
Mao was an active and able leader. In response to the February 7th Massacre, the Hunan branch of the CCP organised demonstrations, memorial meetings, even an attempt to get the local railroad workers to strike in sympathy. In March, in protest at Japanese territorial demands, the branch organised a protest demonstration of some 60,000 people. However, Mao’s policy was towards a radical bourgeois democracy not socialism, In April 1923 he wrote: “If we analyse the influential factions within the country, there are only three: the revolutionary democratic faction, the non-revolutionary democratic faction, and the reactionary faction. The main body of the revolutionary democratic faction is, of course, the Kuomintang; the rising Communist faction is co-operating with it. … The Communist Party has temporarily abandoned its most radical views in order to co-operate with the relatively radical Kuomintang. … This [co-operation] is the source of peace and unification, it is the mother of revolution, it is the magic potion of democracy and independence. Everyone must be aware of this.”[27]
Convinced the CCP needed further and more comprehensive direction, Maring travelled to Moscow, and largely on the basis of his report the ECCI issued the famous 13 point directive of 24 May 1923 as instructions for the forthcoming 3rd National Congress of the CCP.[28]
The directive repeated that the “Central task for China is the national revolution against the imperialists” and, in the light of the recent strikes declared that the chief demand to be made by the CCP on the KMT was for unreserved support for the labour movement in both north and south China. This would supposedly rally the forces of the working class and enable the CCP to grow into a mass party of the proletariat while it remained within the KMT!
In this directive the ECCI, for the first time, publicly recognised that the success of the national bourgeois democratic revolution depended on the millions of small peasants. It proposed that the CCP urge the KMT to adopt a programme the most important demand of which was seizure of large private estates and church and monastery lands, and their distribution to the peasantry. The KMT responded by agreeing to a token gesture of calling for a 25% reduction in land rent. This minor concession which made little difference to the lives of the peasants was praised to the skies by Borodin and used as a fig leaf to hide his failure.[29]
It would be wrong to draw too close a parallel between Russia and China, but the 1917 Revolution in Russia had demonstrated clearly that peasants do not limit their demands to those acceptable to the landlords. Indeed, Lenin had concluded that the Russian bourgeois-democratic revolution could cross over into the socialist precisely because no party of the national bourgeois (or petty-bourgeoisie) was prepared to satisfy the peasants’ hunger for land.[30] The same situation existed in China. The different sectors of the bourgeoisie; comprador, banker, factory owner and, especially, the families of army officers all had large holdings in the rural areas. The CCP was allied with a bourgeois party and if its demands undermined the economic and social position of the entire bourgeois class the KMT would inevitably break that alliance. The ECCI directive sounded great but could not be enacted in any meaningful way without confrontation between the CCP and KMT.[31]
-
Dov Bing, Sneevliet and the Early Years of the CCP, The China Quarterly, 1971, No. 48, p677-697.
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Mao Tse-tung, Footnote 21 to Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society, Selected Works FLP, 1926, Vol1 p13-21.
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Brandt, C. Stalin’s Failure in China, 1924-27, Harvard U.P. 1959, p47.
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Saich, T. The Origins of the First United Front in China, Brill, 1991, p116-117, p 84.
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Isaacs, H. Documents on the Comintern and the Chinese Revolution. The China Quarterly, 1971, No. 45, p100-115.
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Chen Duxiu The Immediate Tactics of the CCP, November 1922. Henk Sneevliet papers, socialhistory.org.
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North, R. Moscow and the Chinese Communists, Stanford U.P., 1963.
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Alexander, Op. cit.
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Lescot, P. Before Mao, Collins, 2004, p40.
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Ho Kan-chih, A History of the Modern Chinese Revolution, PFLP, 1959, p40.
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Manifesto of the 2nd Congress of the CCP Brandt et al, in A Documentary History of Chinese Communism, Allen & Unwin, 1952, p65.
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Lenin, V. Draft Theses on the National and Colonial Question June 1920, CW31: 144-151.
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Lenin, V. Speech on Affiliation to the British Labour Party, May 1920, CW 31: 257-263.
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Dov Bing, Op. cit.
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Bolshevik Leadership Correspondence 1912-1927, Rosspen, 1996.
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Chen Duxiu Appeal to All the Comrades of the Chinese Communist Party December 10, 1929, w.m.org.
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Alexander, Op. cit.
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Sneevliet papers, Op. cit.
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Brandt et al., A Documentary …. Op. cit. p67.
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4th Congress of the Communist International, Theses on the Eastern Question, 5 December 1922, w.m.org.
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Theses on the Eastern Question, Op. cit.
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Trotsky, L. The Challenge of the Left Opposition (1928-29) New York 1981, p202-3.
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Sneevliet papers Op. cit.
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Mao Zedong, Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society, Footnote 13, 1926 w.m.org.
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Dorland, A. The Concept and Function of “China” in Trotsky MA thesis, Mc Gill Univ., Montreal, Canada. 1971.
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Schram, S. Mao’s Road to Power Sharpe, 1992, Vol 2 p157.
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Degras, J. The Communist International, Selected Documents, 1965, OUP, Vol 2 p25-26.
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Jacobs, D. Borodin: Stalin’s Man in China. Harvard U.P., 1981.
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Lenin, V. From a Publicist’s Diary, Sept. 1917, CW 25:278-286.
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Borkenau, F. Communist International, 1919-1945, Faber and Faber, Ltd., p278 and 343.