The Red Flag: A History of Communism (46 page)

The Indian Communists found it equally difficult to adapt to the local culture. Some, like Roy, exulted in rejecting Hindu mores such as caste, and Communists were often depicted as an alien, foreign force as a result. They were also unlucky in their rivals – a relatively liberal British imperial administration, expert in dividing its opponents, and Mohandas Gandhi’s nationalist Congress party. Gandhi created a highly successful nationalism, blending a curious mix of mildly progressive though
anti-modern socialism with Hindu traditions. He succeeded in forging a powerful coalition of the dominant peasantry and urban middle classes whilst retaining the moral high ground by using a pro-poor rhetoric and rejecting violence. Intellectuals with some sympathy for the USSR and the Modernist Marxism of the Plan – like India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru – were persuaded to stay within Congress, and remained faithful to a fundamentally liberal view of politics.

In the early 1920s, Japan, as the most industrialized country in Asia, had been seen by the Comintern as the most hopeful place to see a proletarian revolution. But by the mid-1920s, the Comintern’s attention had moved to China. How, though, could a small group of students and academics, eager to transform Chinese culture, have any effect on such a diffuse society? Their initial strategy was remarkably similar to that of the Russian agrarian socialists of the 1870s. They tried to put their ideals into practice, by setting up ‘work-study societies’, which often involved communal living. They also tried to urge workers and peasants to boycott Japanese goods, or reform the Confucian family system.
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However, they found that most ordinary people were not interested, and the work-study societies were also short-lived. For many, the May 4th movement seemed to have failed. Culture and education would change nothing. China remained weak and divided; its population ignorant and deferential, its rulers corrupt and selfish. Lu Xun’s powerful story of 1921, ‘The True Story of Ah Q’, expressed the despair of his generation. It is the story of a petty thief living in a village during the last years of the Qing Empire. He is a pathetic figure, frequently beaten and bullied by his neighbours, and he retains his self-esteem by bullying those who are weaker than him. After alienating the local gentry family he moves to the city, where he joins a gang of thieves and hears about the 1911 republican revolution. On returning to the village to sell stolen goods, he tries to frighten the gentry by pretending that he is himself a revolutionary. However, real nationalist revolutionaries descend on the village and join forces with the gentry to arrest him for a theft he has not actually committed. The story ends with the execution of Ah Q. Ah Q is China, at the mercy of its more powerful neighbours. But he is also the unenlightened poor Chinaman, pathetically ignorant of his humiliating position within an entrenched social hierarchy.
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It was this awareness of the enormous difficulty of transforming China that led many of the May 4th generation from a Romantic socialism or
anarchism to Bolshevism. There was at first a great deal of ignorance about the ideology. When Li Dazhao wrote one of the first articles about it in November 1918, the subject was so alien that the printer transliterated the word ‘Bolshevism’ into the Chinese characters for ‘Hohenzollern’.
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However, what little was known of Marxism appeared extremely appealing at this time of crisis: it was committed to uniting a disorganized and fissiparous nation; it was not afraid to use violence; and, unlike a nationalism based on the nineteenth-century European model, it identified selfish elites as the main obstacle to national rebirth. On 1 July 1921 Chen Duxiu echoed Lu Xun’s pessimism about the Chinese, and his Promethean frustration with their supposed passivity. They were ‘a partly scattered, partly stupid people possessed of a narrow-minded individualism with no public spirit who are often thieves and traitors and for a long time have been unable to be patriotic’. Democracy was impractical. Instead ‘it would be best to undergo Russian Communist class dictatorship. Because in order to save the nation, make knowledge widespread, develop industry and not be stained with a capitalist taint, Russian methods are the only road.’
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Given their admiration for the Soviet example, it is no surprise that Chinese Communists looked to Moscow and the Comintern for help. Indeed the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was essentially a joint Chinese–Soviet venture from the beginning, largely set up by Chen Duxiu and the Russian Comintern representative, Grigorii Voitinskii. Formally established in Shanghai in July 1921, it sought to absorb many of the study groups in the cities of China, and to subject them to Bolshevik-style discipline. But from the very beginning there were tensions between the Chinese and Moscow. Of course, ‘Bolshevization’ was a fraught process everywhere, and initially it was easier than in the West because the Chinese Communists welcomed the discipline they thought they lacked. Yet the cultural differences between the Russians and the Chinese were probably greater, and the power of locality, lineage and personal networks even stronger in China, than elsewhere. Moreover, Moscow was imposing a much more gradualist strategy on Asia than Europe, so the gap between the goals of the Comintern and of the locals was bound to be that much greater. The conflict between Lenin’s alliance strategy and Roy’s proletarian radicalism, far from being resolved, continued to dominate Chinese Communist politics throughout the 1920s.

In 1923 a young Russian emissary to China, Sergei Dalin, wrote about his experiences in the Komsomol newspaper
Komsomolskaia Pravda
. ‘Matters are discussed without a chairperson or secretary and everyone speaks whenever they like or feel it necessary,’ he complained. Discussion was endless, and the Chinese were reluctant to come to decisions. When, during one debate, Dalin suggested that each side sum up for five minutes before holding a vote:

Dalin’s complaints were typical, and despite the Comintern’s efforts to create a Bolshevik-style party, it ran up against opposition from Chen and others, who were determined that the party remain a relatively broad church. The Comintern did not always use the best techniques to achieve its aims – some officials, like Voitinskii, were sensitive and popular amongst the Chinese; others, like the Dutchman Hendricus Sneevliet, who had had considerable experience in Dutch-ruled Indonesia, were more overbearing. One Chinese Communist who worked with him remembered: ‘He left the impression with some people that he had acquired the habits and attitudes of the Dutchmen that lived as colonial masters in the East Indies.’
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One way of inculcating Bolshevik methods and attitudes was by sending Chinese Communists to Moscow for training. At its height, the Communist University of the Toilers of the East had 1,500–2,000 students at any one time. Its curriculum was very similar to that at the Lenin School for Western Communists, although language problems complicated things, and students had to slave endlessly over their Russian. Learning new forms of behaviour was also fraught with difficulty. Students here, as in other party institutions, were expected to undergo ‘self-criticism’, or ‘study-criticism’. Students had to criticize their fellows, and then submit to criticism themselves. This ‘emotionless struggle’ would help them to eliminate bad thoughts. By the 1930s, these ‘struggle’ sessions were
exported to China itself, and became a central part of Communist Party practice. But in the early years they were deeply unpopular, breaking with the traditional Chinese emphasis on ‘face’ and group consensus.
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However, the Soviet–Chinese relationship was not only damaged by these questions of centralization, but by a more fundamental political question – the relationship between Communism and nationalism. Chinese intellectuals were attracted to Communism because it could be yoked to the nationalist cause. It seemed like a way of reviving a weak China. But how could class struggle be reconciled with national unity?

The Comintern answered the question by following its highly gradualist line. A cross-class ‘national bourgeois’ revolution would have to unite China first. In 1923, the Comintern therefore decided to support not only the Communists but also Sun Yat-sen’s nationalist Guomindang, which was looking for foreign friends. The Guomindang received a dedicated Soviet adviser, Mikhail Borodin, and Red Army officers taught Guomindang and Communist soldiers at the Huangpu Military Academy on an island south of Canton. Nationalists also joined Chinese Communists at the Sun Yat-sen University of the Toilers in China in Moscow, founded in 1925.
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The Comintern persuaded the Guomindang and the Communists to join together in a ‘United Front’; the Communists would become a ‘bloc within’ the Guomindang that would, at some time in the future, take over the whole party.

The Guomindang welcomed both Soviet military aid and advice. It even reorganized the party along centralized Bolshevik lines, underlining the appeal of the Soviet organizational blueprint in Asia. But it was divided between a left, committed to the Communist alliance, and a right, closer to the Chinese elites. On Sun’s death in 1925, it looked as if the centre had won, when Chiang Kaishek, the head of the military section at the Huangpu Academy, took control. Chiang was at first a great admirer of the USSR, which he visited in 1923, and his son was a member of the Komsomol. But he never supported social revolution, and he soon found himself in conflict with the Soviet advisers and the Guomindang left, whom he believed were conspiring against him.
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Chen Duxiu and the Communists were initially reluctant to follow the Comintern’s advice and join the United Front with the Guomindang. In 1923 Chen went along with the policy, but as the Guomindang moved to the right, and local elites began to resist social reforms, he began to press for the end of the alliance. All ‘selfish’ elites, including the gentry
and the bourgeoisie, were now the enemy. China would only be strong and united when these elites were overthrown by the proletariat.

The decisive move to the left came on 30 May 1925. A strike at a Japanese-owned factory was put down forcibly by the foreign-controlled, principally British or Indian Shanghai police. Twelve workers were killed, and the ‘May 30th movement’ – demonstrations and boycotts of foreign goods – spread throughout China’s cities. The events seemed to be straight out of a Marxist-Leninist textbook; the links between imperialist and class oppression seemed crystal-clear. Communism became more fashionable amongst writers and intellectuals, and membership of the party swelled to 60,000; it was on the verge of becoming a mass party for the first time. The Communists also enjoyed some success in organizing trade unions in the cities, and began to achieve real breakthroughs in the countryside. As Guomindang armies took over ever vaster swathes of China, peasant associations took the opportunity to challenge their landlords’ control, which worried the gentry who were the Guomindang’s natural supporters. The Communists, naturally, were eager to help.

The nationalists soon had their revenge. In 1926 Chiang Kaishek launched his ‘Northern Expedition’ – a military campaign to unite China and defeat the warlords. His National Revolutionary Army, trained and financed by the Soviets, marched up the Chinese eastern seaboard, sometimes defeating, but more often absorbing warlords. An important consequence was that the Guomindang became even more reliant on the gentry and the military, and more hostile to social reform. As Chiang approached Shanghai, the Communists led a pre-emptive uprising of some 200,000 striking workers, seizing power from the local warlord ruler. But in the spring of 1927 Chiang’s forces captured Shanghai and finally destroyed the United Front. With the help of businessmen, city fathers, the authorities in the international settlement, and the notorious Green Gang mafia, Chiang arrested and killed large numbers of Communists and their sympathizers.

The Shanghai massacre marked a catastrophic end to the Comintern’s attempts to manipulate Chinese politics, and it led to vicious recriminations in both China and Moscow. Chen Duxiu was made the scapegoat and removed, but the destruction of the Chinese Communist Party really demonstrated the bankruptcy of both Lenin’s and Roy’s ideas. Stubbornly committed to Lenin’s United Front, the Comintern had provided finance and training for the very army that was to massacre the
party. But the Chinese Communists were also guilty of Roy’s proletarian utopianism. They set about organizing urban worker revolution, even though the Chinese proletariat was tiny and workers often felt greater loyalty to secret societies and lineages than to their ‘class’. More-over, the Chinese Communists lacked their own military force but believed they could hold their own against rivals armed at Comintern expense. Failed insurrections in Indonesia in 1926–7 also convinced the Comintern that urban revolutions were premature in Asia.

The Shanghai massacre was followed by a ‘white terror’. Communists were purged from the Guomindang, and the remaining Communists fled to the mountains, where they established Communist ‘base areas’. There were over a dozen of these, but they were far from the centres of power. Comintern blunders seemed to have destroyed the Communist prospects that only two years earlier seemed so rosy.