The ECCI imposed on the CCP, the stagist theory that China had to complete the democratic revolution before proceeding to the socialist, and that the appropriate strategy was the bloc within. The newly-founded CCP, as a member of the CI accepted its discipline and the leadership of Moscow. As the ECCI perspective increasingly clashed with reality and the CCP leadership objected, advice gave way to orders and the true relation of the national sections to the centre in a Stalinist organisation was revealed.
Maintenance of the KMT-CCP block was seen as essential for a successful Chinese national revolution, and as the national revolution was a stage that could not be bypassed, the CCP had to surrender its own particular interests and submit itself to the nationalist party foregoing an independent, critical voice. To a degree and to an extent, there will be genuine common interests of the different classes in a colonial country against imperialism, but Marxism starts from concrete reality and by 1925 at the latest, it was clear that the common interests were fracturing.
It was absolutely correct to support the struggle of Chiang Kai-shek against the northern warlords for a united China. But the nature of the support should have been such as to prepare the proletariat to struggle for its own political independence and to overthrow the Chinese bourgeoisie. By the spring of 1927, the NRA had swept north through the provinces of Hunan, Hubei, and Jiangxi to the city of Nanjing. The mass movement exploded and the generals determined that it was necessary to settle accounts as soon as possible in a military manner, and began recruiting as many mercenaries as possible from the defeated warlords. It beggars belief that the CCP assisted in this process.
In China, a Communist Party of nearly 60,000 and a Young Communist League of about 35,000 were thrown into the class war not to take it forward, not to give the mass movement a revolutionary character and direction, but to side with the bourgeoisie against hungry peasants desperate for land, against women and children fighting for a living wage. The result was the almost complete destruction of the party.
The Stalinists insisted on pursuing a policy that resulted in one disaster after another (from Chiang’s 20 March Coup to the Wuhan debacle) because the interests of the bureaucracy within the Soviet Union were more important in determining Stalin’s policy than the success or failure of the Chinese Revolution. For their own factional interests, the response of the bureaucracy to events in China was to cover up, to lie and finally to blame others for the disasters. The bureaucracy withheld from the CCP any knowledge of Trotsky’s proposal to break the bloc within out of fear that the Chinese Communists would compare and weigh the two policies and, in view of their own experiences, might favour what Trotsky proposed. This could have brought victory to the Chinese Revolution, but would have destroyed the Stalinist faction’s control of the AUCP(B), an outcome intolerable to the reactionary, privileged Russian bureaucracy. Peng Pi-lan has argued “the second Chinese revolution was sacrificed for the sake of preserving the privileged position of the bureaucrats in Russia.”[64]
Finally, in a time of retreat by both workers and peasants Ch’u Ch’iu-pai and Lominadze opposed a united front strategy based on democratic and transitional demands that could mobilise the masses. In a time of reaction, democratic and economic activities such as the call for the right to belong to a union and demands for higher wages were thrown overboard. The result was a rapid decline in worker support of the CCP. This confirmed that the ECCI and the CCP did not understand the importance of the defeats at Shanghai and Wuhan. First the mass of the proletariat recoiled from the policies of the CCP, and then so did the peasantry – though this took a little more time.
Borodin, after the Wuhan debacle, said:
The big bourgeoisie can never unify China because they are not really against the imperialists; they are allied with them and profit by them. The small bourgeoisie cannot unify China because they vacillate between the workers and peasants on the one hand and the big bourgeoisie on the other and, in the end, go over to the latter. The workers and peasants did not unify China because they trusted too much to the small bourgeoisie.[65]
Roy offered much the same opinion:
Rather than sacrifice the sectional interests of the reactionary landlords and capitalists, the bourgeois nationalist leaders betrayed the revolution. Class solidarity cut across national solidarity.[66]
The Second Chinese Revolution had confirmed Lenin’s analysis that in colonial and semi-colonial countries the major tasks of the ‘bourgeois’ revolution could not be solved under the leadership of the ‘national’ bourgeoisie. It also demonstrated a basic tenet of the Permanent Revolution, that the interests of the imperialists, compradors, national capitalists and landlords were integrated to a much greater degree than were the interests of the national bourgeoisie, the peasants and the workers.