Peasant rebellion and partisan warfare has a long tradition in China and these traditions were alive in south and central China in the aborted revolution of 1925-7. The millions who stood up and made an effort to take the land for themselves were in direct line with those who had founded the Han and Ming dynasties and marched in the footsteps of the Long-Haired Taipings.
Yet the peasants who rose in 1926-7 could have succeeded where all their ancestors had failed. Out of a society dissolving under imperialist penetration, the elements of a new solution were taking form. The peasants, backward, scattered and socially-stratified could supply the motor force of change but play no independent role. The Chinese bourgeoisie was bound into the system by rent and usury. The new class of urban workers seeking to change society in its own interests could, by linking its fortunes to those of the agrarian workers and poor peasants, break through the vicious historical circle by leading the struggle for seizure of the land and its re-distribution to the peasants by the peasants.
Shortly after its founding, the CCP was confronted by great revolutionary questions. The immaturity of the leadership, the lack of grounding in Marxist theory or practice, combined with the speed of development of events, meant there was little possibility of it developing its own independent policy. The leadership of the CCP sincerely believed their only hope of avoiding very grave errors was the guidance of the Communist International. They subordinated themselves to the policies of the ECCI and in so doing surrendered the independence of the Party to the bourgeoisie.[88]
As a result of ECCI advice and instructions, the second Chinese Revolution (1925-27) was crushed in three distinct stages: Shanghai, Wuhan, and Canton. The completely opportunist line of the Comintern which was accepted by the majority of the CC of the CCP was expressed in five issues:
- The question of the Party. An absolutely independent party of the proletariat is a first and decisive condition for communist politics. The CCP entered a bourgeois party and became subservient to it depriving the working class of its own party at the most critical period of the class struggle. Stalin and the ECCI considered the KMT to be a multi-class party, but no matter what the proportion of workers and poor peasants within the KMT, it was a party of the bourgeoisie because of its leadership and its actions.
- The question of imperialism. It was quite correct for the CI to state that the agrarian feudal remnants in China were inextricably linked with imperialism, but the CI refused to accept that the fundamental interests of feudal elements, compradors, landlords, bankers, factory owners and business men were all linked together in a network based on usury and rent.
- Of course the Chinese bourgeoisie conflicted with the most reactionary feudal militarists and occasionally with imperialism but such conflicts always took second place at the decisive moment to its irreconcilable antagonism towards the workers and poor peasants. The only hope for the success of the anti-imperialist revolution was for the proletariat supported by the poor and middle peasants to crush the bourgeoisie’s attempts to compromise with imperialism.
- The question of the KMT. The Comintern leadership mistook the petty-bourgeois intellectuals at the top of the KMT for allies in the class struggle. However, these people were more closely linked to the bourgeoisie than the rural and urban poor, selling them out at the decisive moment to the big bourgeoisie. It was not a question of alliance with Wang Jingwei against Chiang Kai-shek, but of an alliance of the toiling masses against Wang Jingwei and Chiang Kai-shek.
- The question of Soviets. Soviets can and must be created from the very first stage of a broad revolutionary upsurge. Soviets can arise from strike committees or peasant associations and then grow and extend their functions and increase their authority in the eyes of the masses. Finally, they become the organisations of a revolutionary uprising and, if victorious, they become the organs of revolutionary power.
- When the revolution was on the rise, the Stalinists denied any place for Soviets in the democratic struggle and the CCP actively opposed their formation. Then, with the revolution in retreat, in a sudden and complete about-face, the CCP declared Soviets to be the immediate task of the Chinese Revolution and launched them, bureaucratically deformed and short-lived.
- The Stalinists were completely out of phase with reality. An international smokescreen of lies and deception was used to conceal the fact that Stalin’s policies, especially regarding Soviets, had resulted in defeat for the Chinese Revolution.
- What strategy to adopt in a counter-revolutionary situation? Trotsky proposed a defensive policy of democratic demands to preserve the revolutionary forces, unite and re-energise the masses. These would have been along the lines of demands for an eight hour day, freedom of speech and assembly, the right to strike, capped by the demand for a National Constituent Assembly elected by universal suffrage. Instead Stalin proposed as an “immediate practical task the preparation for and carrying through of armed insurrection as the sole path to the completion of the bourgeois-democratic revolution and to the overthrow … of the Kuomintang.”[89] Millions of peasants would die as a result of this directive (about a million in one encirclement campaign alone) not to mention the many millions of peasants left to the tender mercies of vengeful landlords.
The defeat of the revolution placed Chiang Kai-shek in power, and ushered in a period of counter-revolutionary terror, economic disintegration, impotence in the face of imperialism, and military invasion by the Imperial Japanese Army. In these circumstances the bourgeoisie were unable to develop democratic institutions, and could hold onto power only through brutal military dictatorship. Chiang Kai-shek adopted a policy of ‘non-resistance’ to the Japanese invasion but there was no policy of ‘non-resistance’ towards the Chinese masses; for them it would mean ruthless suppression of any attempt to organise resistance to the invasion, it meant extermination of whole sections of rebellious peasantry in central China, and it meant handing over large sections of the country to the Japanese imperialists. These were fruits of the defeat of the revolution of 1925-27.