In East and South-East Asia, however, Stalin had less direct power, whilst the local Communists were more confident. There Communist parties had melded the Soviet tradition with indigenous ideas, stressing the anti-imperialist elements of Lenin’s and Stalin’s legacy. And it was this synthesis that was to give Communism a new lease of life. In the West, Communism had found fertile soil largely in tension between social classes. In Russia, Communists benefited from both class conflict and a powerful desire to improve the status of a ‘backward’ nation. But in Asia – the next centre of global Communism – it had emerged largely in a different context: the conflict between the empires of the West and the colonies of the South. And to understand these powerful, new versions of Communism, we need to return to the aftermath of World War I. For this catastrophic war had brought not only a crisis of Europe’s elites, but also of its overseas empires.
The East is Red
I
In June 1919 a 29-year-old native of French Indochina, Nguyen Tat Thanh, entered the Palace of Versailles. According to some reminiscences, he wore a morning suit, but if he did it was a hired one. He was a far from eminent figure, working as a retoucher of photographs and fake Chinese antiques. In his hands he held a petition, which he hoped to deliver to President Wilson and his fellow peace-makers. Entitled ‘The Demands of the Annamite [i.e. Vietnamese] People’, it was a relatively moderate document, demanding political autonomy (rather than independence) for the Vietnamese and equal rights with their French imperial masters.1 It was signed with a pseudonym, Nguyen Ai Quoc – ‘Nguyen the Patriot’. Nguyen had hoped that it would be included on the conference agenda, and he had some reasons for optimism. Towards the end of the war, Wilson had championed the principle of self-determination of oppressed peoples, and although he did not explicitly mention non-Europeans, colonial nationalists were optimistic it would be applied to them. But Nguyen merely received a polite letter from Wilson’s senior adviser promising to draw it to his attention. Wilson probably never saw it, but even if he had it would have had little effect. Versailles endorsed self-determination for the European subjects of the old empires, but not for their colonial subjects.2
Nguyen’s response to this rebuff was to transfer his hopes from Wilson to Lenin. He soon joined the French Socialist Party and in December 1920 became a founder member of the French Communist Party. He then left Paris for Moscow in 1923, where he may have studied at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East (KUTV) or ‘Stalin School’ – the Comintern school for Asian Communists and the sister institution to the Europeans’ Lenin School.3 Within a few years he had become an important Comintern figure (a regular resident of the Hotel Lux), and had accepted a new revolutionary nom de guerre – ‘He Who Enlightens’, or ‘Ho Chi Minh’.
Ho Chi Minh was not the only Asian intellectual disappointed in Wilson. The Chinese Chen Duxiu hailed him in 1919 as ‘number one good man in the world’, but went on to co-found and lead the Chinese Communist Party.4 The young Mao Zedong, a political activist in provincial Hunan, found the betrayal at Versailles shattering, and set up a journal, the Xiang River Review, in which he published his thoughts on the tragedy. Mao urged his readers to study the ‘Russian extremist party’ which, he believed, was spreading revolution throughout South Asia and Korea – his first reference to Bolshevism.5
Yet in truth, any alliance between Wilson and Ho Chi Minh was doomed to failure. Wilson was undoubtedly eager to keep European imperialism in check, but had little real interest in colonial peoples and their rights. He regarded them as ‘underdeveloped peoples’, who would very slowly move towards independence, presided over by benign Westerners; he particularly admired British imperialist methods and, more generally, was a cultural Anglophile. He would not have regarded tumultuous nationalist revolutions as the way forward. Moreover, as an American Southerner, he shared many of the racist assumptions of his background. It is therefore no surprise that he acquiesced in the demands of his European and Japanese allies; he accepted that their empires should survive, and, albeit reluctantly, agreed to the transfer of the eastern Chinese enclave of Shandong in China from the defeated Germans to the victorious Japanese.6
Moreover, if Wilson was no radical, Ho Chi Minh was certainly no liberal. The son of a disgraced government official, he left Vietnam in 1911 and travelled the world, working as a ship’s kitchen hand. Embarked on what was effectively a ‘grand tour’, he visited the colonial world and then spent extensive periods living in the United States, London and Paris. Already resentful of the French imperial presence in Vietnam, his experiences allowed him to generalize his critique of imperialism, and witnessing the humiliations of African-Americans in the United States and of Africans and Asians in the European empires sharpened his consciousness of white racism. By the time he reached London he was already seen as a radical. The great French chef Auguste Escoffier spotted him in the kitchens of the Carlton Hotel, and offered to teach him how to cook if he abandoned his revolutionary ideas. Ho agreed to learn the art of patisserie, but spurned Escoffier’s political advice. He became involved in an organization to improve the conditions of Chinese labourers, and protested in favour of Irish independence.7 On arriving in Paris in 1917 Ho became active in labour and socialist circles. He was a reserved figure, amongst the French at least. The French socialist Léo Poldès rather patronizingly described his ‘Chaplinesque aura’, ‘simultaneously sad and comic’. ‘He was très sympathique – reserved but not shy, intense but not fanatical, and extremely clever.’8 But one of his fellow nationalists described Ho Chi Minh as a ‘fiery stallion’.9 And by 1921 he had concluded, partly (he claimed) as a result of reading Lenin’s Theses on National and Colonial Questions, that only violence and socialism would free his people.10
Ho was in Paris at a time when the old order was under attack in the colonial periphery, as well as in Europe. In parts of the British Empire, the Great War had a similar effect to the one it had in Europe. Almost a million Indian soldiers had fought in British armies, whilst tens of thousands of Chinese went to Europe to work on the home front. Indians and Chinese, like the European working classes, felt that they should have some compensation for their sacrifices. At the same time, it was clear to many Asian nationalists that Europe had been hugely enfeebled by war, and the international balance of power was changing. As Ho wrote presciently in 1914, ‘I think that in the next three or four months the destiny of Asia will change dramatically. Too bad for those who are fighting and struggling. We just have to remain calm.’11
As Ho realized, war was weakening old hierarchies throughout the world. In Europe, this took the form of social revolutions; outside it, anti-colonial revolts: 1919 saw rebellions against the British in Egypt, Afghanistan and Waziristan (in today’s Pakistan), Gandhi’s civil disobedience campaign in India, and the declaration of an Irish republic. Further East, the Korean March 1st movement and the May 4th movement in China protested against resurgent Japanese imperialism.
Communism was in some ways a useful vehicle for frustrated anti-colonial movements. European empires generally operated through local collaborating elites, and the Communist claim that domestic inequalities were closely connected with international injustice was a powerful one. Working classes were tiny, of course, but Lenin had justified revolution in backward Russia on the grounds that it was a semi-colony of Europe. Stalin was also a man of the colonial periphery, and was keenly aware of the importance of imperialism in the Bolshevik rise to power. The Comintern therefore soon threw its support behind anti-imperial movements.
However, from the beginning, Asian Communists encountered difficulties competing with nationalist movements that could deploy patriotic messages and fused local political cultures with modern state-building more effectively. Nor were they helped by the Comintern’s sectarianism and exclusivity. Moscow was convinced that revolutionary prospects were best in Europe amongst the industrialized working class. The colonial world, they believed, could not achieve socialism for some time t
o come and had to concentrate on the anti-imperialist struggle, in alliance with bourgeois nationalists if necessary, with the aim of establishing independent ‘democratic republics’.
The first congress of the Comintern in March 1919 had little to say about colonial upheavals. Hopes for revolution in Western Europe were still high. By the following year, however, it was becoming clear that Western Europe would not fulfil its revolutionary promise. However, the Bolsheviks hoped that nationalist movements, especially in Soviet-ruled Central Asia, might provide vital allies at a time when their own regime was so weak. The second Comintern congress in the summer of 1920 therefore devoted a great deal of time to the colonial question, and many more non-European delegates were invited. Its conclusions were reinforced by another Comintern congress – this time specifically devoted to the colonial question – held in the Caucasian town of Baku, the First Congress of Peoples of the East. It was attended by a diverse band of Communists, radicals and nationalists representing thirty-seven nationalities, most of them from the former Russian and Ottoman empires.12
It was in Baku that sharp divisions emerged between the Eurocentric Soviets and more radical Asians. Lenin, who opposed Popular Fronts so strongly in Europe, thought them the ideal recipe for ‘backward’ Asia. Communists, he urged, should forge alliances with bourgeois nationalists and radical peasants to fight for freedom; socialism proper had to be put off to the distant future. His analysis, however, was vigorously opposed by the more radical Indian Narendra Nath Bhattacharya (a.k.a. M. N. Roy). Before World War I Roy had been a member of a Bengali anti-British terrorist organization. He had then fled to the United States and Mexico, where, during its revolution in 1917, he became a socialist – converted by the Russian Communist Mikhail Borodin – and founded the first Communist party outside the USSR. In 1919 he decided to go east, as he put it, to ‘witness capitalist Europe collapsing, and, like Prometheus unbound, the revolutionary proletariat rising to build a new world out of the ruins’.13 What he saw, though, was the failure of the Western revolutions. Whilst in Berlin in 1919–20, he realized the future for Communism lay in the colonial world, and not in Europe. As he reminisced:
Having personally experienced the debacle of the German revolution, I could not share the optimism that the proletariat in a number of countries would capture power as soon as the World Congress meeting in Moscow sounded the tocsin… the proletariat would not succeed in their heroic endeavour to capture power unless Imperialism was weakened by the revolt of the colonial peoples.14
From that time, Roy resolved to open up ‘the second front of the World Revolution’ in the colonial world.15
It followed, in Roy’s opinion, that Communists should not just rely on bourgeois nationalists, who, he argued, were too closely allied with the ‘feudal’ order. Instead they had to mobilize a potentially radical working class, which Roy insisted was developing in Asia. The argument between Lenin and Roy came to a head over their assessment of the Indian nationalist leader Mohandas Gandhi. Lenin saw him as a revolutionary, whilst Roy claimed, not implausibly, that he was a ‘religious and cultural revivalist’ and was ‘bound to be reactionary socially, however revolutionary he might appear politically’.16
Lenin began to question his old views of Asia. He decided against endorsing a single strategy and encouraged Roy to write his own theses, which the Comintern then approved together with his own. And over the next eight years the Comintern followed an uneasy hybrid course combining both Lenin’s and Roy’s lines. Alliances with bourgeois nationalists were the preferred course, but at the same time the Comintern focused on workers rather than peasants. However, although a hybrid course would prove to be inspired, it was not this one. Indeed, it was only once the Comintern influence waned that local anti-colonial leaders, amongst them Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh, created a new and successful Asian model of Communism. Like the Communism Stalin had forged by the 1940s, it merged Communism with nationalism. But unlike the Stalinist model, with its hierarchy so redolent of the tsarist service aristocracy, it developed a more egalitarian radicalism and a more inclusive approach to the peasantry. By the 1930s and 1940s, this radical Communist nationalism came to be enormously attractive to generations rebelling against their Confucian heritage. In 1919 China experienced what can perhaps be seen as a cultural revolution, as momentous in its impact as those espoused by Rousseau in the eighteenth century and Chernyshevskii in the nineteenth. And within three decades China was to become a second pole of Communist influence to the East, spreading its revolution to much of the Confucian world and beyond.
II
One of the most famous works of modern Chinese literature is a short story by the writer (and future Communist sympathizer) Lu Xun. In ‘The Diary of a Madman’, written in April 1918, the narrator tells of his gradual realization that all of his fellow countrymen are in fact cannibals: ‘I have only just realized that I have been living all these years in a place where for four thousand years they have been eating human flesh.’ ‘When I was four or five years old’, he recalls, ‘my brother told me that if a man’s parents were ill, he should cut off a piece of his flesh and boil it for them if he wanted to be considered a good son…’ Determined to investigate he begins reading histories of China, but he only sees the characters ‘virtue and morality’ which are rapidly replaced by the characters ‘eat people’. The story finishes with the madman desperately hoping that all is not lost: ‘Perhaps there are still children who haven’t eaten men? Save the children…’17
‘The Diary of a Madman’ is a scathing attack on Confucianism, the value system that had been the foundation of Chinese culture and politics for 2,000 years. Confucianism was a philosophy of order, hierarchy and strict moral codes. At its heart was a model of society based on the paternalistic family: subjects had to obey rulers, children parents, and women men. Everybody in the hierarchy had to behave ‘morally’ – i.e., according to their station – and education, enormously important in Confucian thought, was principally intended to perfect behaviour. At the summit of the social and political hierarchy was the Emperor, governing through gentleman-bureaucrats who had passed lengthy examinations in classical literature and Confucian principles. Their mastery of Confucian texts, it was believed, bestowed on them the moral legitimacy to rule.
Lu Xun’s response to the society he lived in was typical of his generation of intellectuals – a rebellious anger, setting the frustrated outsider against a society of all-encompassing cruelty and hypocrisy.18 Everybody in Lu Xun’s universe is perceived as a link in a rigid chain of being, forced to be both oppressors and victims. As Lu Xun’s younger contemporary Fu Sinian wrote, ‘Alas! The burden of the family!… Its weight has stifled countless heroes!’ ‘It forces you to submit to others and lose your identity.’19 But Confucianism did not just provide personal misery for China’s ambitious youth. Lu Xun and his contemporaries believed that it weakened China, creating a slavish and enfeebled people. As another young rebel, Wu Yu, explained: the Confucian family system rendered 400 million people ‘slaves of the myriad dead, and thus unable to rise’.20 The answer was a complete cultural revolution.
This searing cultural and political critique is strongly reminiscent of those articulated by Chernyshevskii and in some respects Rousseau. For Lu Xun as for them, the cruelty of the family and the old hypocritical and repressive order was intimately linked with the weakness of the nation. Like Rousseau’s France and Chernyshevskii’s Russia, China was a once-great imperium, now humiliated by its rivals. For centuries the Chinese state was relatively untroubled by its neighbours, and it did not need to develop the political structures and taxation system for a powerful military force. As a result, when the much more warlike European states arrived in the nineteenth century, the Chinese were forced to acquiesce in foreign colonization. The British, French and Germans secured footholds on the Chinese mainland – especially in Shanghai – enclaves where foreigners had privileges not granted to Chinese. Meanwhile, Japan, recently and dramatically
‘modernized’, had also become an imperial power, seizing control of Southern Manchuria and the old Chinese vassal state of Korea. These defeats had brought a revolution against the Qing dynasty and with it the Chinese empire, which collapsed in 1911. But the revolution had hastened, not staunched, China’s decline. The new leader, the head of the nationalist party (the Guomindang), Sun Yatsen, was soon replaced by the conservative Yuan Shikai, and after Yuan’s death in 1916, central rule in China collapsed, degenerating into a congeries of warlord-governed regimes – an empire no more. It was in this weakened, divided state that it faced the peace-makers at Versailles. On 4 May 1919, the news that the Japanese had been awarded the ex-German colonies inspired 3,000 students to gather in Tian’anmen Square, before moving on to stage a more destructive protest in Beijing’s diplomatic quarter. More importantly, Versailles focused the minds of Chinese students and intellectuals on the need to revive China. These were the people who were to become the founders of Chinese Communism.
The May 4th movement (preceded by the similar ‘New Culture’ movement of 1915) proposed largely cultural solutions to China’s plight: Confucianism had to be replaced once and for all with a ‘new culture’. Rather like Chernyshevskii’s ‘new people’, the new Chinese had to escape from the bonds of the traditional family into a world of freedom and Romantic love. At the same time the very ethos and behaviour of Chinese had to be made modern. Just as Chernyshevskii had decried the Russians’ aziatchina or ‘Asiatic values’, so the May 4th intellectuals despaired at what they (and Westerners) saw as an ingrained Chinese servility. Chen Duxiu (born in 1879), the dean of humanities at Peking University and an influential leader of the New Culture movement, urged young Chinese to ‘be independent, not servile’ and ‘aggressive, not retiring’.21
The Red Flag: A History of Communism Page 33