The Red Flag: A History of Communism (45 page)

From that time, Roy resolved to open up ‘the second front of the World Revolution’ in the colonial world.
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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’.
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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.

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…’
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‘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.
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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.’
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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’.
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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’.
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But where were these models of behaviour to be found? For some, like Chen, the answer was in Western culture. Chen, the son of a minor official and himself educated for the Confucian examinations, now rejected ancient Chinese culture wholesale. The Chinese had to learn from ‘Mr Science and Mr Democracy’. But others, like Li Dazhao (born in 1888), the librarian at Peking University and, with Chen, a co-founder of the Chinese Communist Party, were less enamoured of Western liberalism and science. Li was from a rather less exalted background – a rich peasant – and by the time he was at school the old Confucian examination system had been abolished. He therefore had less emotional investment in rejecting the past, and sought rather to adapt Chinese culture, not replace it wholesale. He put more faith in the ‘will of the people’ than in liberal capitalism or constitutional politics. Indeed, he was one of the first to welcome the Russian revolution as a model for China. So whilst both Chen and Li were to become Communists, they came to represent different wings of the movement. Chen’s was closer to Lenin’s Modernist socialism, with their interest in modern, centralized organization. Li’s was a more radical socialism, with a belief in the power of the people’s
will to transform society.
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Backward China might not be economically ready for socialism, but as an oppressed ‘proletarian nation’ it undoubtedly possessed the energy for revolution. Li’s Romantic version of Marxism was to be an enormous influence on a young visitor from Hunan, also from a rich peasant background, to whom he gave a job as assistant librarian on his first visit to Beijing in 1918 – Mao Zedong.

Interest in socialism and the Russian path intensified after the perceived betrayal by the West at Versailles. The Soviets themselves enormously enhanced their reputation in China when, in 1920, they abandoned all Russian claims on Chinese territory. But it was always likely that intellectuals would find Bolshevism more appealing than liberal talk of constitutions and rights. They may have been rebels against Confucianism, but they were products of Confucian culture, and admired socialism’s commitment to self-sacrifice and social solidarity.
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As recent ex-Confucians, they appreciated Marxism’s claim to provide a complete understanding of the world and society, and also its lofty disapproval of commerce. And, of course, they also welcomed the important role it gave to an intellectual elite: the socialist vanguard was not too far from the Confucian literati-gentlemen, spreading virtue through education and moral example.

Communism flourished amongst urban intellectuals in other parts of the Confucian world as well. By the end of the 1920s, Communists were at the forefront of the anti-Japanese nationalist movement in Korea, although they were soon repressed by the colonial authorities.
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The fusion of Confucius and Marx was clearest in Vietnam – another region in the Confucian cultural sphere. As in China, a new generation questioned the Confucian verities of their parents. Trained at French-run rather than traditional Confucian schools, they began to criticize the old thinking and blame their culture for their weakness in the face of French oppression, and in 1925–6 Vietnam’s cities saw a rash of radical student demonstrations against French rule. Ho Chi Minh, from his base in Southern China, exploited this dissatisfaction, but he also understood the importance of reconciling Communism with Confucian culture. In 1925, with Comintern help, he set up the Vietnamese Revolutionary Youth League as a broad, cross-class party. He stressed nationalist rather than Communist goals, though he also formed a secret inner group committed to the victory of Marxism-Leninism in the long term. Ho’s Marxism had a strongly Confucian flavour, and he even attempted,
rather unconvincingly, to reconcile the two great sages, Confucius and Lenin:

His
Road to Revolution
devoted a whole chapter to the ideal moral behaviour of the Communist. Lenin would never have used such an explicitly moralizing language, as morality was always to be subordinate to the needs of the revolution. Ho himself sought to be seen as a Confucian ‘superior man’, with all of his qualities;
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and the leadership style of this mandarin’s son was in stark contrast to that of the rebellious peasant, Mao.

In other parts of Asia it proved more difficult to embed Marxism in the local culture. Japan, although part of the Confucian cultural universe, had developed a more militaristic political culture than its bureaucratic Chinese counterpart; the ideal of a world ruled by scholar-administrators who had mastered the laws of history was rather less appealing to its martial elites. The Communists also found that in Japan, unlike China, Vietnam and Korea, it was impossible to merge Marxism with nationalism. A powerful and successful Japanese nationalism, fostered by political and military elites, already flourished, and Japan had an empire of its own. The Comintern was implacably hostile to the emperor cult – a central feature of Japanese nationalism. Japanese Communists pleaded for the Comintern to relax its rigid line, but in vain, and such wranglings meant that the Communists in Japan were easily presented as foreign stooges and were subjected to harsh repression.
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