by Edgar Snow
On his side, Generalissimo Chiang agreed to consider the soviet districts part of the “national defense area,” and pay accordingly. The first payment to the Reds ($500,000) was delivered shortly after Chiang Kai-shek’s return to Nanking. Some of the Kuomintang money was used to convert soviet currency, to buy manufactures for their cooperatives, and to purchase needed equipment. The exact monthly allowance from Nanking was still under negotiation—as, indeed, was the whole definitive working agreement for future cooperation—while the storm of Japanese invasion was gathering in the North.
In June the Generalissimo sent his private plane to Sian for Chou En-lai, the Reds’ chief delegate, who flew to Kuling, China’s summer capital. There Chou held further conversations with Chiang Kai-shek and members of the cabinet. Among points discussed was the Communists’ demand for representation in the People’s Congress—the Congress scheduled to adopt a “democratic” constitution—in November. It was reported that an agreement was reached whereby the “Special Area” would be permitted to elect nine delegates on a regional basis.
However, these delegates in all probability would not be known as “Communists.” Nanking had not openly acknowledged the so-called remarriage. It preferred to regard the relationship rather as the annexation of a concubine whose continence had yet to be proved, and one about which, for diplomatic reasons, the less said outside family circles the better. But even this furtive mésalliance was an astounding and open defiance of Japan, unthinkable a few months previously. Meanwhile Japan’s own offer (through Matchmaker Hirota) of a respectable “anti-Red” marriage* with Nanking was finally spurned. In this was perhaps a last and definite indication that Nanking’s foreign policy had undergone a fundamental change.
All that seemed an utterly incomprehensible denouement to many an observer, and serious errors were made in its analysis. After a decade of the fiercest kind of civil war, Red and White suddenly burst into “Auld Lang Syne.” What was the meaning of it? Had the Reds turned White, and the Whites turned Red? Neither one. But surely someone must have won, and someone lost? Yes, China had won, Japan had lost. For it seemed that a final decison in the profoundly complicated internal struggle had been postponed once more, by the intervention of a third ingredient—Japanese imperialism.
6
Red Horizons
There was an accomplished social scientist named Lenin. “History generally,” he wrote, “and the history of revolutions in particular, is always richer in content, more varied, more many-sided, more lively and ‘subtle,’ than the best parties and the most class-conscious vanguards of the most advanced class imagine. This is understandable, because the best vanguards express the class consciousness, the will, the passion, the fantasy of tens of thousands, while the revolution is made, at the moment of its climax and exertion of all human capabilities, by the class consciousness, the will, the passion, and the fantasy of tens of millions who are urged on by the very acutest class struggle.”*
In what ways had Chinese history proved “richer in content, more varied, more many-sided, more lively and ‘subtle,’” than the Communist theoreticians foresaw a decade or so ago? To be specific, why had the Red Army failed to win power in China? In attempting an answer one had to recall again, and keep clearly in mind, the Communist conception of the Chinese revolution, and of its main objectives.
The Communists said that the Chinese capitalist class was not a true bourgeoisie, but a “colonial bourgeoisie.” It was a “comprador class,” an excrescence of the foreign finance and monopoly capitalism which it primarily served. It was too weak to lead the revolution. It could achieve the conditions of its own freedom only through the fulfillment of the anti-imperialist movement, the elimination of foreign domination. But only the workers and peasants could lead such a revolution to its final victory. And the Communists intended that the workers and peasants should not turn over the fruits of that victory to the neo-capitalists whom they were thus to release, as had happened in France, Germany, Italy—everywhere, in fact, except in Russia. Instead, they should retain power throughout a kind of “NEP” period, a brief epoch of “controlled capitalism,” and then a period of state capitalism, followed at last by a speedy transition into Socialist construction, with the help of the U.S.S.R. All that was indicated quite clearly in Fundamental Laws of the Chinese Soviet Republic*
“The aim of the driving out of imperialism, and destroying the Kuomintang,” repeated Mao Tse-tung in 1934,† is to unify China, to bring the bourgeois democratic revolution to fruition, and to make it possible to turn this revolution into a higher stage of Socialist revolution. This is the task of the soviet.”
At the apex of the Great Revolution (1925–27) there was present the necessary revolutionary mood among both the peasant masses and the proletariat. But there were many differences from the situation which had produced the Russian Revolution. One of these was very great. Survivals of feudalism were even more pronounced in Russia than in China, but China was a semicolonial country, an “oppressed nation,” while Russia was an imperialist country, an “oppressor nation.” In the Russian Revolution the proletariat had to conquer only a single class, its own native bourgeois-imperialist class, while the Chinese revolution had to contend with an indigenous enemy of dual personality—both its own nascent bourgeoisie and the entrenched interests of foreign imperialism. Theoretically, in the beginning, the Chinese Communists expected this dual nature of their enemy to be offset by the dual nature of their own assault, which would be aided by their “proletarian allies” of the world, and the “toilers of the U.S.S.R.”
Nearly half of all the industrial workers of China huddled in Shanghai, under the gunboats of the world’s great powers. In Tientsin, Tsingtao, Shanghai, Hankow, Hongkong, Kowloon, and other spheres of imperialism were probably three-quarters of all the industrial workers, of China. Shanghai provided the classic prototype. Here were British, American, French, Japanese, Italian, and Chinese soldiers, sailors, and police, all the forces of world imperialism combined with native gangsterism and the comprador bourgeoisie, the most degenerate elements in Chinese society, “cooperating” in wielding the truncheon over the unarmed workers.
Rights of freedom of speech, assembly, or organization were denied these workers. Mobilization of the industrial proletariat in China for political action was hardly conceivable as long as the dual system of native and foreign policing power was maintained. Only once in history had it been broken—in 1927—when for a few days Chiang Kai-shek made use of the workers to secure his victory over the northern warlords. But immediately afterwards they were suppressed in one of the demoralizing bloodbaths of history, with the sanctification of the foreign powers and the financial help of foreign capitalists.
The Nanking regime could and did count upon the security of the industrial bases held by the foreign powers in the treaty ports—and on their troops, their guns, their cruisers, and their inland police, the river gunboats—and on their wealth, their press, their propaganda, and their spies. It did not matter that instances of direct participation of these powers in actual warfare against the Red Army were few. They occurred on the occasions when such action was necessary. But their chief services were rendered by policing the industrial workers, by furnishing Nanking with munitions and airplanes, and by entering into a conspiracy which complacently denied the very existence of civil war by the simple device of calling the Communists “bandits,” so that the embarrassing question of “nonintervention committees” (as in the case of Spain) was never even allowed to arise.
Communist leaders were obliged to fall back on the rural districts, where the soviet movement, while retaining the aims and ideology of proletarian class consciousness, in practice assumed a peasant-based national social revolution. In the rural areas the Reds hoped eventually to build up sufficient strength to be able to attack urban bases where foreign influence was less firmly established and later—with the help, they hoped, of the world proletariat—to invest the citadels of foreign pow
er in the treaty ports.
But while the imperialist powers were the objective allies of the Chinese bourgeoisie against communism, the assistance that Communists expected from the world proletariat failed to materialize. Although in the Communist International Programme* it was clearly recognized that successful proletarian movements in semicolonial countries such as China “will be possible only if direct support is obtained from the countries in which the proletarian dictatorship is established” (i.e., in the U.S.S.R.), the Soviet Union in fact did not extend to the Chinese comrades the promised “assistance and support of the proletarian dictatorship” in any degree commensurate with the need. On the contrary, the great help, amounting to intervention, which the Soviet Union gave to Chiang Kai-shek until 1927 had the objective effect of assisting him into power —although, at the same time, it helped create the revolutionary opposition in the Red Army movement that arose later on. Of course, the rendering of direct aid to the Chinese Communists after 1927 became quite incompatible with the position adopted by the U.S.S.R.—for that would have been to jeopardize by the danger of international war the whole program of Socialist construction in one country. Nevertheless, it must be noted that the influence of this factor on the Chinese revolution was very great.
Deprived of material help from an outside ally, the Chinese Communists continued to struggle alone for the “hegemony of the bourgeois revolution,” believing that deep changes in internal and international politics would release new forces in their favor. They were quite mistaken.
The Kuomintang’s power remained relatively secure in the great urban centers, for the reasons mentioned, but in the villages it developed only very slowly. Paradoxically—and dialectically—the rural anemia of the bourgeoisie was traceable to the same source as Nanking’s strength in the cities—to foreign imperialism. For while imperialism was eager enough to “cooperate” in preventing or suppressing urban insurrection, or possibilities of it, at the same time it was objectively engaged—chiefly through Japan, the focus of the system’s point of greatest stress in the Far East—in collecting heavy fees for this service, in the form of new annexations of territory (Manchuria, Jehol, Chahar, and East Hopei), new concessions, and new wealth belonging to China. The great burdens placed upon the Nanking Government by this newest phase of imperialist aggression made it impossible for the Kuomintang to introduce in the rural areas the necessary capitalist “reforms”—commercial banking, improved communications, centralized taxing and policing power, etc.—fast enough to suppress the spread of rural discontent and peasant rebellion. By carrying out a land revolution the Reds were able to satisfy the demands of a substantial peasant following, take the leadership of part of rural China, and even build several powerful bases on an almost purely agrarian economy. But meanwhile they could grow no stronger in the cities, on which their enemies continued to be based.
In this situation, the Communists argued that the Kuomintang’s attacks on the soviets prevented the Chinese people from fulfilling their mission of “national liberation” in driving out the Japanese, and that the Kuomintang’s own unwillingness to defend the country proved the bankruptcy of its leadership. But the enraged Nationalists retorted that the Communists’ attempts to overthrow the government prevented them from resisting Japan, while the continued practice of “Red banditry” in the interior, despite the grave national crisis, retarded the realization of internal reforms. And here in essence was the peculiar stalemate, the fundamental impotence of this period of the Chinese revolution.
Over this decade the imperialist pressure gradually became so severe, the Japanese price for the protection of the interests of the Chinese compradors in the cities became so excessive, that it tended to neutralize the class antagonisms between the Kuomintang, the party of the bourgeoisie and the landlords, and the Kungch’antang, the party of the workers and peasants. It was precisely because of this—and because of the immediate events described in the foregoing chapters—that the Kuomintang and the Communist Party were thus able, after a decade of ceaseless warfare, to reunite in a synthesis expressed in terms of their essential unity on the higher plane of a common antagonism against Japanese imperialism. This unity was not stable; it was not permanent; it might break up again whenever the internal denials outweighed the external ones. But it began a new era.
At the end of a decade of class war the Communists had been forced to abandon temporarily their thesis that “only under the hegemony of the proletariat” could the bourgeois democratic movement develop. Instead it was acknowledged that only “a union of all classes” could achieve those purposes. Its practical significance was the clear recognition of the present leadership—which was here synonymous with power—of the Kuomintang in the national revolution. For the Reds it had certainly to be considered “a great retreat,” as Mao Tse-tung had frankly admitted, from the days in Kiangsi, when they fought “to consolidate the workers’ and peasants’ dictatorship, to extend this dictatorship to the whole country, and to mobilize, organize, and arm the soviets and the masses to fight in this revolutionary war.”* The armed struggle for immediate power had ceased. Communist slogans became these: to support the Central Government, to hasten peaceful unification under Nanking, to realize bourgeois democracy, and to organize the whole nation to oppose Japan.
Practical gains resulting from these concessions have already been discussed. But what guarantees had the Communists that these gains could be held? What guarantees were there that the internal peace would be maintained, that the promised democracy would be realized, that a policy of resistance to Japan would last?
In such periods “it is necessary,” wrote Lenin, “to combine the strictest loyalty to the ideas of communism with the ability to make all necessary compromises, to ‘tack,’ to make agreements, zigzags, retreats, and so on.” And thus, although among the Chinese Communists there was this great shift in strategy, still they believed it was now possible to conduct the contest in a much more favorable atmosphere than in the past. There had been an “exchange of concessions,” as Mao Tse-tung said, and an exchange to which “there are definite limits.”
He continued: “The Communist Party retains the leadership on problems in the soviet districts and the Red Army, and retains its independence and freedom of criticsm in its relations with the Kuomintang. On these points no concessions can be made. … The Communist Party will never abandon its aims of socialism and communism, it will still pass through the stage of democratic revolution of the bourgeoisie to attain the stages of socialism and communism. The Communist Party retains its own program and its own policies.”1
Quite clearly the Kuomintang would utilize to the fullest extent the benefits of the new Communist policy toward itself. With Nanking’s authority recognized by the only political party in China capable of challenging it, Chiang Kai-shek would continue to extend his military and economic power in peripheral areas where warlord influence was still strong, areas such as Kwangsi, Yunnan, Kweichow, and Szechuan. Improving his military position all around the Reds, he would meanwhile extract political concessions from them in return for his temporary toleration. Eventually, by skillful combination of political and economic tactics, he hoped so to weaken them politically that, when the moment was right for the final demand of their complete surrender (which he undoubtedly still aspired to secure), he might isolate the Red Army, fragmentize it on the basis of internal political dissensions, and deal with the recalcitrant remnant as a purely regional military problem.
The Reds were under no delusions about that. Likewise they were under no delusions that the promise of “democracy” could be fulfilled without a continued active opposition of their own. No party of dictatorship in history ever yielded up its power except under the heaviest pressure, and the Kuomintang would prove no exception. The achievement of even the measure of “democracy” now in prospect would have been impossible without the ten-year presence of an armed Opposition. Indeed, without that Opposition no “democracy” would have been nece
ssary, and no state power with the degree of centralization which we now began to witness in China would have been conceivable. For the growth of popular government was, like the maturing of the modern state itself, a manifestation of the need for a power and mechanism in which to attempt to reconcile contradictions inherent in capitalist society—the basic class antagonisms.
These contradictions were not diminishing in China, but rapidly increasing, and, to the extent that they sharpened, the state had to take recognition of them. The achievement of internal peace itself made it inevitable, if that internal peace were to last, that Nanking reflect a wider representation of social stratifications. That did not mean that there was any likelihood of the Kuomintang quietly signing its own death warrant by genuinely realizing bourgeois democracy, and by permitting the Communist Party to compete with it in open election campaigning (for it was quite possible that the vote of the peasantry alone would have given the Communists an overwhelming majority), although that is what the Communists and other parties demanded, and would continue to agitate for. But it did mean that some recognition of peasant demands would have to be made by the tiny minority which monopolized the state economy and policing power. The tentative concession of representation of the soviet areas in the National Congress was an indication of that.
The centripetal spread of economic, political, and social interests, the process of so-called “unification”—the very measures which created the system—at the same time required, for their own preservation, that ever widening groups be focused in the center in an attempt to resolve the insoluble—the deepening conflict of class interests. And the more Nanking tended to represent different and wider class interests throughout the country—the nearer it came to achieving democracy—the more it was forced to seek a solution of self-survival by resistance to the increasingly greedy demands of Japan.