The 6th Congress of the CCP (18 June – 10 July 1928) was held in Moscow not only because the situation in China was so dangerous, but also to allow the ECCI to better stage-manage the proceedings for public consumption. The Congress took place on the back of a series of policy failures of disastrous proportions and of major changes in international policy.
Internationally the Third Period line had been adopted at the 9th Enlarged Plenum of the ECCI (February 1928) and confirmed at the 6th World Congress (17 July – 1 September 1928) which decreed that a revolutionary mass armed uprising was imminent in China, and outlined a revolutionary programme based on urban revolts similar to the abortive Canton insurrection of the preceding December.[23] These ideas naturally flowed into the 6th Congress of the CCP and meant the CCP placed an anathema on democratic demands and rejected any meaningful united front activities. The CCP had to immediately and consistently advocate seizure of state power, organise Soviets as organs of insurrection (à la Canton), expropriate landlords and big property owners, and expel the foreign imperialists.
There were two serious problems with this perspective. The first was that the movement was in a severe downturn and proposals of this nature simply alienated any remaining support amongst the urban masses. The second was that the goal of the armed insurrection was given as the overthrow of the Kuomintang and its replacement by … the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry. Another cycle of betrayal was in the making.
In political terms, and for the healthy development of the CCP, the Congress was a disaster. The Congress resembled a bear pit with accusations flying in all directions (except at Stalin!) as the different trends vied for Moscow’s support.
The defeats suffered had been the result of the policies accepted and enacted by the CCP itself. But the Congress did not attempt to come to grips with the fundamental errors underlying the defeats – the mistaken assessment of the revolutionary role of the national bourgeoisie in China, and the need for a truly independent Communist Party. From these had flowed the mistakes of failing to support the formation of workers’ and peasants’ Soviets, and of submitting to the discipline of the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois politicians of the KMT.
At the Congress, Bukharin’s nine hour speech heaped the blame for the Party’s defeats on those who had implemented Moscow’s instructions, Chen Duxiu and Ch’u Ch’iu-pai (appointed less than a year before).[24] Within the Party those who attempted to objectively review events were expelled.
The new style ‘Bolshevisation’ which had begun with the 7 August Conference advanced significantly during the 6th Congress when the delegates accepted Stalinist-style self-criticism as acceptable behaviour. Lenin’s democratic centralism meant the minority was required to accept the decisions of the majority and then allow the test of events to determine who was right. Such a procedure could not be tolerated under the bureaucracy because the desired outcome was not a political line best matching events but a policy that best protected the bureaucracy. Indeed, a political line matching reality would have meant the end of the bureaucracy. The new style Bolshevisation meant any minority had not only to enact the majority line, it had to publicly confess and repent its ‘errors’, promise to expunge its ‘erroneous’ thoughts and swear unquestioning loyalty to the majority (bureaucratic) line. This self-flagellation became accepted procedure within the CCP and would grow into the rectification campaigns extensively used in Yenan and later.
Having to defend Stalin’s line and cover up the mistakes of the recent past meant the CCP sank into a self-contradictory mess: it formally condemned putschism, but endorsed the continuation of the policy of isolated uprisings; it formally endorsed the need for a democratic programme for China while its ultra-left activities prevented united actions. It condemned the call for a national assembly as an opportunist error and so lacked a central focus for democratic demands. By default the call to establish Soviets, intended as a propaganda slogan to be actioned at some indeterminate time in the future, became the governmental slogan of the Party at just the time when the proletariat needed defensive slogans.[25]
The Congress defended the policy which produced the Canton tragedy. A resolution declared that “the Nanchang insurrection, the Autumn Harvest uprising, and especially the Canton Commune, did not constitute adventurism”; rather “the Canton Commune opened the Soviet period” in the Chinese Revolution while simultaneously (and contradictorily) being a “heroic rear-guard action”. The CCP formally accepted Stalin’s view that Soviets should only appear “when the solid victory of the uprising is assured” but warned that allowing elections in these Soviets would give a voice to “petty bourgeois democratism” which would be dangerous (for the leadership of the Party).[26] Given the history of the CCP, free discussion was anathema and so was classified as petty-bourgeois and a threat to the revolution. That the CCP believed it had the authority to decide when and how to launch Soviets and who would be elected, starkly revealed how far its bureaucratic and anti-democratic views had developed, and was an open warning of how Soviets in the base areas being set up by the Red Army would be managed.
The 6th Congress chose a forty-year old labourer, Hsiang Chung-fa as new General Secretary because of his proletarian background, a dedicated but not overly clever man. The real authority within the Party would soon lie with Li Lisan as head of the Propaganda Bureau aided by Zhou Enlai as head of the Organisational Bureau. During the 6th Congress, Li Lisan was called to the Kremlin to be interviewed by Stalin and it was on that basis that he was given the leadership.[27] We can be confident that Stalin assessed how loyal Li Lisan would be to him personally and the new ultra-left Third Period line.
The Congress agreed that work amongst the peasantry was essential but its general outline was determined by events in the Soviet Union not what was happening in China. Over the summer of 1928 the struggle between Bukharin’s Right Opposition and the Stalinists had not been finally resolved; thus the 6th World Congress of the CI and the 6th Congress of the CCP agreed that the Party should “unite with the petty-bourgeoisie and rich peasants (kulaks) to oppose all reactionary forces.” In June 1929 the struggle against the Right Opposition was over and the political line of the CI changed to one of resolute struggle against the kulaks for leadership of the peasant masses.[28] These changes were transmitted into the CCP and caused considerable friction between those such as Mao who favoured the softer line, and others who would try to force the adoption of the more radical.
The Congress, with ECCI guidance, adopted a long resolution On the Organisation of Soviet Political Power,[29] which declared the central issue in the peasant movement was the need for an amalgam of the CCP, peasant Soviets, and the Red Army to establish military-style bases in the countryside which would grow to encircle the cities and give an impulse to the rising tide of revolution. Interpretation of this resolution would lead to differences between those who emphasised the building of bases in the countryside (Mao) against those (Li Lisan) who wanted to use the Red Army to attack urban centres sparking an urban, proletarian revolution. Mao’s defining strategy, which would later be paraphrased as ‘from the periphery to the centre’, originated with the ECCI and was, to a degree, a desperate attempt to hide the failure of the CI and CCP to win the urban proletariat.
The CCP was in disarray everywhere, communications between groups, cells and individuals was difficult and slow. Mao, thus largely freed of central direction, took advantage of the situation to push his own perspective. In April 1927 he persuaded Zhu De to join forces with him to set up a Communist-controlled area in the border region between Jiangxi and Hunan. Subsequently, Mao would claim that nearly 20,000 ‘fighters’ had joined him. This move was approved by the local Party committee and, later, by the 6th CCP Congress. In his absence, the Congress elected Mao Zedong a full member of the CC as a “representative of the tendency that demanded the prompt carrying out of an agrarian revolution.”[30]
Certainly up until the end of 1928, the Red Armies generally did not remain in one place for long enough to be able to carry out the CCP’s agrarian policy. Mao had attempted it in the Jiangxi/Hunan border area but had been driven out and moved south to the even more remote area of the Jiangxi/Fujian border. However, during 1929 the CCP was able to begin effecting land distribution in a number of areas, thereby gaining a social significance that it had lacked previously. In line with the resolution passed at the 6th Congress, the land confiscated was limited to that of the larger landlords and public land. It will be shown that the benefits of this distribution often went to the better-off peasants who rushed to join the Red Army and staff the administrative apparatus in the territories controlled by the CCP.[31]
Mao’s land programme sounded radical and revolutionary; the old tax offices were destroyed and many tax collectors, KMT officials, military men, gentry and missionaries were killed. The policies of ‘No rent (to the landlords), no taxes (to the KMT authorities), and no debts (to the usurers)’ were implemented. All deeds, land titles, debt registers, tax rolls of the old regime were completely destroyed.[32] By allocating ownership of the land to the peasants who had previously farmed it, the policies remained within bourgeois democratic limits. We should not, however, belittle the progressive nature of these measures as far as the individual peasants were concerned. For many it represented a significant improvement in their lives and the basis of their support for the CCP.
In the meantime, Chiang had captured Nanjing, boastfully declared it the capital of a unified China, announced an all-China government had been established, the aims of the revolution achieved, and an end to military rule!
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North, R. The Rise of Mao Tse-Tung, The Far Eastern Quarterly, 1952 11(2)137-145.
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Schwartz, Op. cit.
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Trotsky, L. Problems of the Chinese Revolution, New Park 1969, p120-184.
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Trotsky. L. The Chinese Question After the 6th Congress, w.m.org.
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Lescot, P. Before Mao, Harper Collins, 2004, p105-111.
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Thornton, R. Emergence of a New Comintern Strategy for China: 1928, in International Communism and the Communist International 1919-43, MUP, 2004, p66-110.
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Saich, T. The Rise to Power of the Chinese Communist Party, Sharpe, 1996, p358-368.
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Pantsov, A. and Levine, S. Mao, Simon & Schuster, 2012, p193.
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The Red Armies in 1929-1930: Rev Hist. 1990 2(4)22-25.
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Pantsov and Levine, Op. cit. p225-226.