By Steve Halpern
When we think about the nation of China, we can see how there have been monumental developments in its history. My Google search claims that the Great Wall of China is about 13,000 miles long. Then, there was a fleet of hundreds of Chinese ships that sailed across the Indian Ocean decades before the voyage to the Americas by Christopher Columbus. Then, there was the construction of the 1,776-mile Grand Canal that connected the north of China to the south that was completed in 610 AD.
Starting in the 1990s about 260 million Chinese living in the countryside began to migrate to cities. Those migrant laborers would make China the most industrialized nation in the world, where commodities are exported all over the globe. In three years, China used more concrete than the United States used in the past 100 years.
Mike Davis’ book, Late Victorian Holocausts, documented how during the 19th century literally tens of millions of Chinese starved to death. Davis also gave the evidence showing how Britain and the other imperialist powers were largely responsible for those famines.
Today, we can say that China has done more to eliminate hunger than any other nation in the world. While China continues to have serious problems, I don’t think there is any question that there has been a significant improvement in the standard of living.
However, along with this enormous development, there have also been clear examples of repressive measures by the Chinese government. These include the repression of the protest at Tiananmen Square in 1989, the recent repression of the protests in Hong Kong, and the repression of the national minority known as the Uighurs.
Clearly, there have been many books that attempted to explain this history. In my opinion, there are four authors who have given the clearest explanations. These include former leaders of the Chinese Communist Party, P’eng Shu-tse and his wife Ch’en Pi-lan, a central leader of the Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky, and Harold Isaacs in his book The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution.
Before his death P’eng Shu-tse became critical of the Cuban revolutionary government. Clearly I don’t agree with P’eng Shu-tse’s opinion on this issue. Leon Trotsky was murdered by an assassin who supported the politics of Joseph Stalin in 1940. According to his son, Harold Isaacs gave up his revolutionary perspective years after writing his book on The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution. Given those facts, I believe that the arguments made by these authors on the Chinese Revolution continue to give us a necessary perspective to understand the reality of China today.
The Russian Revolution
In order to begin to understand the perspective of these writers, I believe it is useful to look at the history of the Russian Revolution. Clearly every historical event is unique, but by placing each event in their historical context, we can gain insight into how and why events unfolded.
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin became the central leader of the Russian Revolution largely because he was driven to advance a political course that would be effective. Lenin’s brother Alexander Ulyanov conspired to assassinate the Russian Czar. During those years, there was no pretense that there were democratic rights in Russia. Workers and peasants could be beaten, raped, or murdered and those who had power were rarely, if ever, were held accountable. So, under those conditions there were many who supported the effort to do away with the Czar. As a result of this failed assassination attempt, the Czarist government executed Alexander Ulyanov.
Lenin was close with his brother and, I believe, learned an important lesson from his execution. He learned that there was a popular will to transform Czarist Russia. However, this would only happen if an effective strategy was used to champion the will of the people.
For this reason, Lenin argued that a centralized revolutionary political party, representing the working class and the peasantry was needed. There were many who opposed that point of view and argued that people who favored change had many views and that all those views were legitimate.
Lenin countered that only by organizing and propagandizing with a single voice would the working class ever be able to liberate itself. Clearly, all members of the party would have the right to express their opinions in conferences, but once decisions were voted on, all members needed to support the party’s perspective. For these reasons, Lenin broke relations with people who he had worked with for years.
Before the Russian Revolution communists routinely argued that Czarist Russia would need to go through a period of capitalist development before working people could take power and organize their own government. By the year 1917 Russia was in the midst of the First World War and millions of Russian soldiers lost their lives. There was famine in the cities, in spite of the fact that Russian peasants routinely produced huge amounts of food. Then, in February of 1917 a revolution erupted in Russia, the Czar was deposed, and a Provisional Government took power.
Joseph Stalin was a member of the Bolshevik Party who supported the idea that Russia needed to go through a stage of capitalism before workers could advance a socialist government. The Mensheviks, who would go to war against the revolutionary government, also supported that perspective.
Upon Lenin’s return to Russia, he wrote his April Thesis. In this document Lenin argued that the perspective he advanced in the past was wrong, and the Bolsheviks needed to advance the demand of All Power to the Soviets. The Soviets were workers councils that included the Bolsheviks. If the working class failed to support this demand, Lenin felt the Provisional government would merely continue the same basic policies of the Czar. In fact, the Provisional government refused to support the Bolshevik demands for peace, bread, and land.
Russia, China, and the idea of a nation state
In writing his April Thesis, Lenin needed to reconsider the question of why Czarist Russia was different from other capitalist nations. In the United States, the middle class was able to advance the idea of replacing British colonial feudalism with the capitalist system. While this also happened in Britain, that nation maintained support of the royal family.
This kind of national unity was based on the fact that a capitalist state would be superior to the tyrannical repression that is routine in feudal societies. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels argued that capitalism was an advance over feudalism, they also believed that the capitalist system was born in “dirt and blood.” Marx and Engels witnessed this in the unimaginably horrendous factory system in Britain. In the United States, the repression of the state was made clear with chattel slavery and the genocide against Native Americans.
However, with capitalism people began to see that there was such a thing as individual rights. While workers experienced horrendous conditions, they also learned that they could organize to protest against those conditions. This wasn’t possible with feudalism. As a result, capitalist property relations gave rise to the working class.
In Russia, the middle classes were very weak, and the economy was dominated by foreign capitalists. Lenin began to understand that the only class that could create national unity was the working class in alliance with the peasantry. The middle classes, who were represented in the Provisional Government, could only continue to support the system that caused the horrific conditions the people of Czarist Russia experienced at that time. By working to bring the working class to power, Lenin also argued that it would be necessary to liberate all the oppressed nationalities in a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
Lenin also argued that only the working class had the potential to lead a socialist revolution. There had been many rebellions by peasants in the world, but all those uprisings failed to put in place a worker’s government. In China, there had been massive peasant revolutions for decades. However, all those insurrections failed to force meaningful changes in the country.
Joseph Stalin betrayed the Russian Revolution
The revolutionary government in the U.S.S.R. had many seemingly impossible problems to overcome. Millions of soldiers died because of the Czar’s support of the allied powers in the First World War. There was famine in the cities. Then, fourteen nations supported the army attempting to over-through the revolutionary government. Revolutions in other nations failed to take power. Given all these challenges, many in Russia wanted some kind of normalcy, and were not open to continue the struggle to transform their lives and the country.
Lenin was extremely ill, and Leon Trotsky also developed a debilitating illness. Under those conditions, Joseph Stalin worked to attract former members of the middle class to the Bolshevik party. He set up a system where they could maintain many of their positions of relative comfort, if they followed his commands. In order to consolidate his power, Stalin needed to organize fabricated trials of all the leaders of the Russian Revolution. As a result, after Lenin’s death Stalin organized a bureaucracy that would murder all the leaders of the Revolution.
However, Stalin’s policies didn’t just betray the Russian Revolution. Those policies set back revolutions all over the world.
Germany
In Germany, there was a huge Communist Party that was loyal to Communist International that was headed by Joseph Stalin. The German C.P. could have easily defended itself against the rising political party of fascism. Demonstrations defending worker’s rights were attacked by fascists. The German C.P. had the forces to defend itself from those attacks but decided not to. That party could have formed an electoral bloc with the German Social Democracy and prevented Adolf Hitler’s electoral victory. After the fascists came to power, they began arresting all members of the German Communist Party. Those members didn’t even fire one shot in their defense.
Then, Stalin made a pact with the German fascists. He trusted those fascists even when they mobilized their armed forces to invade the Soviet Union. As a result, it took weeks before the Red Army was able to mount an effective defense that would eventually put an end to German fascism.
The second Chinese Revolution of 1925-1927
Before those events in Germany, there was a massive revolution in China during the years 1925 through 1927. This was known as the Second Chinese Revolution after the first uprising led be Sun Yat-sen in 1911. The first Chinese Revolution was about freeing China from the yoke of the Qing dynasty. The Qing dynasty was the Manchu royal family that ruled China for over 100 years. The Manchus are a minority nationality in Northeast China. The majority nationality is the Han.
However, the revolution of 1911 was incomplete. A nationalist government represented by Sun’s party the Kuomintang was set up in southern China, but warlords continued to rule the north. After Sun Yat-sen’s death in 1925, Chiang Kai-shek became the principal leader of the Kuomintang.
As a result of the 1911 Chinese Revolution, the May Fourth Movement erupted in 1919. 3,000 students marched in Tiananmen Square in Peking. The uprising was sparked by the Anfu dictatorship that gave huge concessions to the Japanese after the First World War. The movement inspired strikes and demonstrations throughout China. This changing consciousness rejected the philosophy of Confucianism and even forced the reform of the Mandarin language. Out of this movement, P’eng Shu-tse was one of many in China who began to study Marxism.
Chen Duxiu was one of two of the original central leaders of the Chinese Communist Party. Chen had participated in the 1911 Revolution and was a central leader of the May 4th Movement. Initially Chen worked with the Kuomintang, but became alienated from the corruption in the organization. This reality led Chen to become inspired by the politics of Lenin and the Russian Revolution.
P’eng Shu-tse joined the Chinese Communist Party in 1920. He was assigned to go Soviet Union to learn from those who made a revolution. He remained in Moscow and became an instructor to other members of the Chinese Communist Party. These were the years before Stalin began to consolidate his power in 1922. During this time, P’eng recruited Liu Shao-ch’I to the Chinese Communist Party. Liu Shao-ch’I became a central leader of the CCP.
Because of his experience in the Soviet Union, P’eng Shu-tse wrote an article about China titled, “Who Is the Leader of the National Revolution?” The following was P’eng’s conclusion: “After analyzing all the classes. . . . we may now affirm that from the standpoint of their material basis, revolutionary consciousness, and the condition of the international revolution. . . . only the working class can become the leader of the national revolution.” Leon Trotsky agreed with this basic point of view, but added that the working class can only come to power with an alliance of the peasantry.
In the following quotation, we see how the perspective of P’eng and Trotsky were in line with the thinking of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin who wrote:
“The Communist International must establish temporary relations and even unions with the revolutionary movements in the colonies and backward countries, without, however, amalgamating with them. But preserving the independent character of the proletarian movement, even though it be still in its embryonic state.”
However, Joseph Stalin and his followers had a completely different perspective. They didn’t believe that Lenin’s ideas in his April Thesis applied to China, arguing that only a “block of four classes” could free China from imperialist exploitation. Those four classes were the Chinese capitalists, the petit bourgeoisie, the workers, and farmers. Stalin’s position on this question was the same as the Menshevik position in Czarist Russia.
Because of this perspective, Stalin supported making the Chinese Kuomintang a member of the Communist International. He also supported giving the Kuomintang large quantities of armaments. Chiang Kai-shek and other Kuomintang leaders cemented this relationship by visiting the Soviet Union, and learning how to appeal to the Stalinist government for those armaments.
Following that perspective, members of the Chinese Communist Party joined the Kuomintang. Not only did Communist Party members join the Kuomintang, they also submitted to its discipline.
When Chiang Kai-shek went to the Soviet Union, he had different motives from P’eng Shu-tse. Chang pretended that he favored the international workers revolution. That perspective was in line with Stalin’s idea of a block of four classes. Because of this meeting of the minds, the Soviet Union would give considerable military support to the Kuomintang for decades.
While Chiang Kai-shek was receiving armaments from the Soviet Union, Harold Isaacs listed the kinds of people who were his early mentors, and who he relied on as a base for his power: “Gangsters, bankers, military men, murderers, crooks, smugglers, and brothel keepers.” As we will see, these were the very people who’s interests were being served with the massive armed support of the Soviet Union for the Kuomintang.
In 1926, Stalin and the presidium of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union sent the following message to the Kuomintang. “We are convinced that the Kuomintang will succeed in playing the same role in the East, and thereby destroy the foundation of the rule of imperialists in Asia.”
Chiang Kai-shek hoodwinked Stalin to send that message with his statement in 1925: “Our alliance with the Soviet Union, with the world revolution, is actually an alliance with all the revolutionary parties which are fighting in common against the world imperialists to carry through the world revolution.”
We might also look at the lives of the workers and peasants of China who had been brutalized by the forces Chiang Kai-shek represented. These workers routinely toiled for up to 16 hours for as little as eight cents per day. Children, as young as seven years of age were among the industrial workers.
In the countryside, peasants lived on the knife edge of starvation. Every year, they needed to go into debt in order to purchase seeds necessary for their survival. These were some of the reasons for the revolutionary uprising of 1925-1927.
Much of the wealth produced by Chinese workers and peasants went to the imperialist powers who were centered in Shanghai. The thinking of Stalin was that his support to Chiang Kai-shek would begin to break the imperialist yoke of China. However, the Russian Revolution had verified the thinking of Lenin, that only the workers and farmers have the capacity to lead a revolution that can liberate humanity. Stalin rejected that perspective and preferred to support Chiang Kai-shek along with the gangsters, bankers, and brothel keepers.
This was the thinking of the Chinese Communist Party when general strikes erupted beginning in 1925. These strikes were centered in the areas of Canton, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Wuhan. The Communist Party was in the leadership of many of those strikes and had a membership of about 60,000. They also had excellent relations with peasant organizations representing ten million peasants. The demands of these workers and farmers couldn’t be clearer.
The workers wanted better working conditions and higher salaries. They also wanted to begin to control their work environments. The peasants wanted to own the land where they worked. While members of the Kuomintang pretended to support the workers and farmers, their actions told another story. It was under those conditions that a general strike erupted in Canton and Hong Kong in Southern China.
On March 30, 1926, Chiang Kai-shek ordered his troops to arrest members of the Chinese Communist Party that were under his command. Since the Communist Party members were required to submit to the discipline of the Kuomintang, they were helpless to defend themselves against this attack.
Michael Borodin was the Soviet adviser assigned to China. Clearly Borodin was angered because Communist Party members were in prison or in hiding because of the actions of the Kuomintang. He confronted Chiang Kai-shek, who responded that this was merely a misunderstanding. Then, Chiang demanded that Borodin continue supplying the Kuomintang with arms, so his armed forces could advance to the North and Shanghai. Borodin agreed to continue supplying Chiang with the armaments he demanded.
P’eng Shu-tse viewed the disaster in Canton and Hong Kong and argued that the Communist Party needed to leave the Kuomintang. By doing this, the party could effectively advance the interests of the workers and farmers. Because of the CCP’s support of the politics of Joseph Stalin, they rejected P’eng Shu-tse’s proposal. Chen Duxiu also favored a break from the Kuomintang at this time.
Leon Trotsky represented a minority of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union at this time. Trotsky wrote a proposal also arguing that the CCP needed to leave the Kuomintang. Trotsky had been a leader of the Russian Revolutions in 1905 and 1917. He also was the commander of the Red Army that successfully defended the Soviet Union from an invasion by 14 nations attempting to overthrow the Revolutionary government. Trotsky argued that the Chinese Communist Party needed to demand all power to the Soviets (workers councils).
The Stalinist government didn’t allow Trotsky’s proposal to be distributed to members of the international, and the Chinese Communist Party members were unaware of that proposal. However, when Stalin’s support of the Kuomintang proved to be a disaster, Stalin blamed this on Trotsky’s proposal. The Chinese Communist Party followed that perspective and blamed Chen Duxiu for the disaster of the defeat of the 1927 Revolution. By 1929 the Chinese Communist Party expelled Chen Duxiu.
Chiang Kai-shek was familiar with the repressive forces in Shanghai as well as the imperialist powers that controlled the economy. The general strike in the city brought Shanghai to a standstill. That general strike allowed Chiang Kai-shek to take political control over the region. He used that control to work with organized crime and his loyal military units to break the general strike. He disbanded the union movement, murdering and torturing thousands of workers who demanded better living conditions.
In the area known as Wuhan, there was a prominent left wing of the Kuomintang that became critical of Chiang Kai-shek. Stalin advised members of the CCP to advise those Kuomintang leaders to support the interests of workers and farmers.
Those leaders of the Kuomintang listened to that advice, and then allowed military commanders to crush the workers and farmers uprising in Wuhan. While those officials of the Kuomintang claimed to have different interests from Chiang Kai-shek, they were tied to the same capitalist interests as the rest of the comprador capitalist class of China.
At this point, the massive Chinese Revolution of 1925-1927 had been defeated. After the defeat of the Russian Revolution of 1905, Lenin understood that the Bolsheviks needed to make a strategic retreat. This was so the party could live to fight another day.
Two advisers from the Soviet Union in China were Michael Borodin and M.N. Roy. Both those advisers argued in support of the “block of four classes” that was the basis for the CCP’s support of the Kuomintang. After the defeat of the 1927 Revolution both these advisers recognized how that perspective led to the defeat of the revolution.
However, Joseph Stalin argued that this same perspective was “perfectly correct.” He argued that the defeat of the Chinese Revolution taught the workers and farmers that the Chinese ruling capitalist class was their enemy. So, after this defeat, Stalin didn’t organize a retreat, but a counterattack.
These uprisings were known as the Autumn Harvest and the Canton Commune. During those uprisings members of the Communist Party continued to wave the blue flag of the Kuomintang. However, Chinese workers and farmers were learning that this flag represented their enemy.
There was a basic problem with those uprisings. When there were general strikes throughout China, there was a real opportunity to make significant gains for the working class, or to even to place a soviet government in power. However, after the defeat of the revolution, the workers and peasants were largely demoralized. As a result, the insurgent forces were outnumbered and had significantly fewer armaments. The results were that the Autumn Harvest and Canton Commune ended in disasters.
Those were the conditions that forced the Chinese Communist Party to abandon their Southern base in Kiangsi and proceed on the Long March to the Northwest of the country. During that time, those who participated in the Long March were being continually chased be the forces of Chiang Kai-shek, who had received arms from the Soviet Union and clamed to support the international revolution.
Because of the defeat of the revolution, P’eng Shu-tse and Chen Duxiu were arrested by the Kuomintang. They served five years of their sentences. Then, the Japanese bombed the prison, and he managed to escape.
The Japanese took advantage of the defeat of the 1927 Revolution and invaded the Chinese province of Manchuria in 1931. Chiang Kai-shek and other officials of the Kuomintang worked with the Japanese in an attempt to preserve their positions of privilege. Instead of battling against the Japanese, Chiang continued his obsession with completing the defeat of the Communist Party. However, there were other Kuomintang officials who wanted to defend China from the Japanese invasion.
Then, in 1935 officers in the Kuomintang arrested Chiang Kai-shek in Sian. While Chiang was under arrest, he had a visit with the Communist Party leader Chow En-lai. Apparently, the Kuomintang military officials were fully prepared to execute Chiang because he refused to battle the Japanese. By this time, Chiang had a horrendous reputation in China and his execution would have been welcomed by many.
However, Chow En-lai appealed to Chiang Kai-shek to become the leader of the national movement defending China from the Japanese invasion. So, the person who ordered the murder and torture of thousands of Chinese, who was supported by the mob of Shanghai, who refused to battle the Japanese because he was determined to completely destroy the Communist party, was now being asked to lead the national movement against the Japanese invasion. Rather than being shot by a firing squad, Chiang agreed to the proposal by Chow En-lai.
After the horrendous defeats of the 1927 Revolution, the CCP agreed to continue to work under the discipline of the Kuomintang. This meant disbanding the Red Army. This also meant that the CCP would be opposed to land confiscations by the peasants. Chiang Kai-shek adopted a law that workers who took part in strikes would be punished with the death penalty.
After the Kuomintang kept Chen Duxiu in prison for several years, they now asked him to become a military commander. Chen had military training. This would have meant that Chen would have had to take orders from from Chang Kai-shek, who's forces murdered Chen's sons as well as thousands of his comrades. Unlike Chow En-lai, who continued to follow the lead of Chang, Chen Duxiu refused to take orders from his enemy.
The defeat of Japan and the third Chinese Revolution of 1949
Chiang Kai-shek did everything in his power to avoid conflict with the Japanese. However, the Japanese were determined to take control of all of China. Eventually, Chiang did organize his forces to battle the invaders, but his officers were so corrupt, his resistance was limited.
By this time the Chinese Communist Party organized a peasant army of about 100,000 soldiers. While the Kuomintang had advanced military supplies, the Communist Party was under the command of the Kuomintang, and their access to military hardware was limited. Therefore, the CCP limited their military engagements with the Japanese to hit and run guerilla tactics.
After the war, the Red Army of the Soviet Union occupied Manchuria. The Japanese constructed industries in Manchuria and the Red Army carted off much of that machinery to the Soviet Union. Then, they handed over the major cities of Manchuria to Chiang Kai-shek, who at that time headed the Chinese government.
However, the Red Army gave the armaments of the Japanese to the Chinese Communist Party. Those heavy and light armaments transformed the armed forces of the CCP, so that about one million of their soldiers were now armed.
After the Japanese defeat, China experienced an extreme crisis. Chinese capitalists worked to grab all the resources they could. U.S. corporations demanded payments for the arms sold to China during the war. As a result, inflation skyrocketed, and most people were unable to get the basic necessities. Under those conditions, Chiang Kai-shek lost most of his support.
During this time, workers in the large Chinese cities mobilized and could have easily overthrown the government of the Kuomintang. However, the Chinese Communist Party was isolated from those workers and was in the leadership of a peasant army.
Emissaries from the Soviet Union followed the path they had advanced for two decades and appealed to Chiang Kai-shek to share power with the CCP. Mao Zedong also made this same appeal. Chiang Kai-shek refused those appeals, and that refusal sealed his fate.
So, after two decades of servile support of the Kuomintang, the Chinese Communist Party mobilized to run that organization out of the country. Members of the Kuomintang had become so demoralized, that in most cities there was little or no resistance to the advance of the CCP.
We might keep in mind that the change in attitude of the CCP paralleled a change in policy of the Soviet Union. After the Second World War, Stalin attempted to develop friendly relations with the imperialist government of the United States. The U.S. government rejected those overtures and advanced the cold war. The U.S. government also came to the conclusion that the government of Chiang Kai-shek was a disaster and all support to that government ended. All these events bolstered the change in policy of the Chinese Communist Party.
However, when the Chinese Communist Party finally took power in China, they hoisted their red flag that had one large star and four smaller stars. Those stars symbolized a “block of four classes.” The strategy of the block of four classes led to the disaster of the defeat of the 1927 Revolution.
The War Against Korea, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution
After the Chinese Revolution of 1949, Chinese workers and peasants experienced many difficult years. Mao Zedong and the CCP never attempted to advance a course of workers democracy, but ruled the nation from the top down. Initially, Chinese capitalists attempted to continue profiting from the workers and farmers. However, the CCP began to see how that course would threaten their rule. So, under those conditions the CCP advanced a course where land was confiscated and given to those who worked the land. Also, the conditions for workers improved.
Then, the United States invaded Korea. The government of South Korea had become so discredited that after the North responded to the southern provocations, there was little resistance to the Northern effort to reunify the nation. However, after the Northern armed forces were almost in control of the South, there was a massive invasion by the United States at Inchon.
The U.S. government looked for aid of their invasion from the United Nations. The Soviet Union had the power to prevent the U.S. from gaining the United Nations endorsement but refused to veto the measure.
Because the North Korean army had significantly fewer arms than the United States, they retreated. Then, the U.S. armed forces invaded the North and went all the way to the Yalu River that borders China.
The Chinese Communist Party understood that the U.S. government was hostile to the revolutionary government. General Douglass MacArthur advanced the idea of invading China while the U.S. armed forces were in North Korea. So, as the U.S. armed forces went into North Korea, the North Korean and Chinese armed forces surrounded them. When the U.S. army reached the Yalu River, they were cut off. The Chinese and Koreans captured an entire U.S. battalion.
The U.S. Air Force responded to that defeat by bombing all of North Korea. One port city in North Korea was bombed continuously every day for two years. In all, millions of Koreans and Chinese lost their lives in the war. However, the United States was forced out of North Korea.
Then, starting in 1958, Mao Zedong put in place his plan of the Great Leap Forward. This effort was, in effect, a mirror of Joseph Stalin’s disastrous plan of forced collectivization. While knowing nothing about the manufacture of steel, Mao had the idea that peasants could produce steel on their farms. While they worked to produce what turned out to be useless steel, the peasants didn’t have enough food, and millions died as a result.
Lenin was clear about what it meant for peasants to work on collective farms. He knew that collective farming could be more productive than working on individual farms. However, Lenin made it clear that the only way to rationally make that transition was to convince famers that collective farming would advance their interests. He also understood that the best way to collectivize agriculture would be to mechanize farming. Both Stalin and Mao rejected that perspective, and their efforts led to disasters.
Liu Shaoqi was the highest ranking official in the Chinese Communist Party next to Mao. While Mao argued that his collectivization of agriculture would take only one year, Liu Shaoqi argued that this would take ten years.
After the disaster of the Great Leap Forward, Mao was forced to give up his leadership position in the party and Liu Shaoqi became the primary leader. Deng Xiaoping also became a central leader. During the years when Liu Shaoqi was the primary leader, he put in place numerous popular reforms.
However, just like Stalin, Mao Zedong worked to establish a cult around himself and didn’t like the fact that he was losing control. He knew that the Communist Party was strongly behind Liu Shaoqi, so he organized the Red Guards to promote himself.
As a result, a civil war broke out and thousands died in the ensuing battles. In the end, Mao regained control of the party and advanced his Cultural Revolution. Millions of young people and intellectuals were sent to the countryside to work on farms. That effort, in effect, destroyed the educational system in the country and the universities closed for about one year.
P’eng Shu-tse and Chen Pi-lan both knew many of the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party who were purged. Chen Pi-lan stated that leaders of the party were victimized for their views going back to 1941 before the 1949 revolution.
P’eng Shu-tse and Chen Pi-lan both needed to leave China in order to escape persecution from the Chinese Communist Party. Other supporters of Leon Trotsky in China served time in prison or disappeared because of their views. P’eng Shu-tse sent a letter to the CCP protesting the victimization of supporters of Trotsky in China.
As a result of Mao’s Cultural revolution, Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping were both denounced and expelled from the party. They both lived in isolation for several years and Liu Shaoqi died of complications from diabetes and pneumonia.
In the years after the Cultural Revolution, the United States went to war against Vietnam. Initially China gave support to the Vietnamese. Then, Mao invited President Richard Nixon to China and carved out a deal in the midst of the war against Vietnam. In order to prove Mao’s loyalty to Washington, China invaded Vietnam after the U.S. withdrawal. Then, Mao supported the murderous regime of Pol Pot in Cambodia. These were the measures that convinced capitalists in the United States to begin to make massive investments in China.
After Mao’s death in 1976, the Gang of Four attempted to continue his legacy. By this time, the entire Communist Party was agreed that the Gang of Four needed to be stopped, and Deng Xiaoping became the central leader of the party. Deng proceeded to cement the relations with international capitalism that began with Mao. He also liberalized the country and allowed for many popular reforms.
Then, in 1989 a new demonstration erupted in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. The demonstration was a revolt against the growing inequality of the country due to the literal invasion of capitalist enterprises. This protest spread to many cities throughout China. In the end, Deng Xiaoping ordered the military to end the protests and hundreds if not thousands lost their lives.
Hukou
Before the Chinese Revolution, the overwhelming majority of the population lived in the countryside. The feudal regimes of China were similar to the feudal regimes in other parts of the world in that they restricted travel by those who lived on the land. In China, they called the system that restricted travel by peasants hukou.
In Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward, he made a disastrous attempt to industrialize the country. In doing this, he utilized the ancient hukou system. People who lived in the cities received financial incentives. The peasantry were restricted to the land and forced to work in the communes. Because of the disaster of the Great Leap Forward, many in the countryside died of a lack of food and the hukou regulations prevented them from travelling to the cities.
During the 1990s, one of the largest migrations in the history of the world began. Eventually about 260 million Chinese who had lived in the countryside moved into the industrial centers in the cities. Many of those who joined in this migration were former students and intellectuals who were forced to live in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution.
Because of this massive migration, the Chinese government gradually reformed the hukou laws. However, people who were born in the cities continued to have advantages with respect to housing, education, health care, and pensions that people born in the countryside didn’t have. Saying all of this, we can say that the Chinese migrants who came into the cities have literally changed the economy of the world.
The exodus of manufacturing from the developed nations
One of the reasons why capitalists have invested so heavily in China has been because of their continual drive to cut costs. That drive comes into contact with the goal of workers to live better and more rewarding lives. These were the underlying causes for the eruptions of the labor and civil rights movements, as well as the movement opposed to the war against Vietnam.
Workers and students lost their lives in all those battles. Yet, those movements forced the government and employers to do things they clearly didn’t want to do. Wages and working conditions improved. Black people gained important rights. The United States was forced to leave Vietnam.
Corporations responded to those developments by making huge investments to build factories in nations where the prevailing wages are between $1 and $10 per day. The largest of those investments went to China.
The Taiwanese owned corporation Foxconn or Hon Hai might have manufactured an electrical device that you own. Foxconn is one of the largest corporations in the world, and most of their factories are located in China. The huge Korean owned corporations of Samsung, LG, and Hyundai all rely on products made in China.
Today, some of the most populated cities in the world are located in China. All this development required more concrete in three years than the United States used in 100 years.
In the late 19th Century, Chinese workers made an invaluable contribution in building the transcontinental railroad in the United States. After that enormous project was completed, the United States government adopted the Chinese Exclusion Act. This law made China the only nation in the world where citizens were prevented from immigrating to the United States.
Today China is advancing its Belt and Road initiative. China is supplying the funds and technology to build transportation and communication enterprises all over the world. Clearly things have changed.
However, with all this development, there have been about 20,000 labor strikes in China every year for the past three years. Large numbers of the minority nationality known as the Uighurs have been detained by the Chinese government. Protesters in Hong Kong have engaged in continuing protests to prevent restrictions in their democratic rights.
When we look at the history of the Chinese Communist Party, we can also see why there are these enormous contradictions. To place those contradictions in context, we can look at the nation of Cuba.
Cuba
P’eng Shu-tse looked at the Cuban Revolution from the perspective of his experience in China. He understood that Cuba had a clearly anti-capitalist revolution. However, he was troubled by the fact that Cuba became reliant on support from the Soviet Union, just as China relied on that support. He didn’t see the emergence of Soviets in Cuba and he felt that this was one of the problems with the Chinese Revolution.
Then, we know that Leon Trotsky had been murdered about twenty years before the Cuban Revolution, and the Cubans were largely unfamiliar with his work. In the early years after the Cuban Revolution, there were Cubans who were critical of Trotsky’s writings. As a result of all those considerations, P’eng Shu-tse became critical of the Cuban government.
Today, in my opinion, P’eng Shu-tse made a serious error in his criticisms of the Cuban government. We can also say that Cuba has survived and maintained its revolutionary perspective in spite of the fact that it lost all support from the former Soviet Union.
Although there are no formal Soviets in Cuba, there are Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDRs). These committees organize their neighborhoods in a democratic way that is unknown in the capitalist world.
Members of the July 26 Movement became the leaders of the Cuban Revolution. The Cuban Communist Party that supported the politics of the Soviet Union joined the July 26 Movement, but they weren’t in the leadership. Only after the revolution did these two organizations merge.
Clearly the Cuban revolutionary government made a serious mistake when they misjudged the amount of sugar the nation could produce in the 1960s. However, when we look at the 61 year history of Cuba after the revolution, there are clear conclusions that can be made.
Soon after the revolution Fidel Castro advanced a program to eliminate illiteracy throughout the nation. Cubans from the cities, including high school students were recruited to live in the countryside to teach people how to read. This effort combined with creating jobs that required literacy. In just a few years, illiteracy was eliminated in Cuba.
Today, older people who participated in the Cuban literacy drive testify that this was an important and inspiring time in their lives. They are proud of having been a part of that effort.
On the other hand, the intellectuals and students who went to the countryside during China’s Cultural Revolution look at those years as a time when they were punished for having an education. Today, many of those who worked in the countryside during those years are running capitalist enterprises or work at alienating jobs in factories.
The Cuban literacy drive was the foundation for their educational system. As a result, today Cuba has more doctors, per capita than any other nation in the world. Cuban doctors volunteer to treat patients in some of the poorest nations in the world. Cuban pharmaceutical and biological research has developed treatments for numerous diseases. Currently, Cuba is working with China to manufacture their Alpha 2B treatment that has been shown to be effective in treating people with the disease COVID-19.
Certainly, the capitalists of the world have seen a difference between China and Cuba. The United States has had a trade embargo against Cuba for 60 years. Capitalists throughout the world have made China a center for their international investments.
P’eng Shu-tse died in 1983 and was not able to see the development of the Cuban Communist Party. We know that P’eng was capable of changing his opinions when he felt they did not correspond to the facts.
Because of the history of the Chinese Communist Party, both P’eng and Leon Trotsky felt it was unlikely for the CCP to take power in China. The events proved them to be wrong on that question. P’eng then took another look at the history leading up to the 1949 revolution and gave a rational explanation of how and why it unfolded. I’m sure that P’eng had the capability of seeing his error with respect to Cuba had he lived to see how the revolutionary government advanced communist politics in the world.
Conclusion
Capitalism became a dominant political economic system, in part, because of massive migrations of farmers into the industrialized cities. This happened throughout Europe. Millions of Black people in the United States left the Jim Crow states where they had no rights. They went to the north and west where conditions weren’t as bad. Many worked in factories where they played an indispensable role in the industrialization of the United States.
Before the Russian Revolution there was also a massive migration from the farms to the cities. However, unlike the developed capitalist nations Czarist Russia was dominated by foreign capital. The middle classes of Czarist Russia showed that they had no intention of granting the basic reforms of peace, bread, and land. The Bolsheviks managed to lead a revolution that created the first workers state in the world.
China had a similar development as Russia. One difference was that in China the middle-class was even weaker than in Russia. That is why the middle class organized itself in the pro-capitalist Kuomintang. In Russia the middle class organized itself in the parties of the Social Revolutionaries and with the Mensheviks.
However, even in the 1930s, Leon Trotsky anticipated that the masses of Chinese peasants would one day become industrial workers. Today we can say that China is the most industrialized nation in the world.
Saying that, Chinese workers have rebelled against the horrendous conditions they face. There have been 20,000 Chinese strikes every year for the past three years. There are now Chinese workers who are studying Marxism and are critical of the Chinese Communist Party.
Workers and students in Hong Kong have seen the repressive measures of the Chinese government and the mounted a sustained rebellion in defense of their democratic rights.
Given the history of the government of the United States, that government has no business being critical of China or any other nation in the world. We can speak about the millions of people who lost their lives because of the U.S. engineered wars against Korea and Vietnam. We can talk about the fact that the United States has the resources to end poverty in the world, yet millions in the U.S. don't have enough food to eat. So, in this country I believe our demands might be hands off China.
Given the history of the government of the United States, that government has no business being critical of China or any other nation in the world. We can speak about the millions of people who lost their lives because of the U.S. engineered wars against Korea and Vietnam. We can talk about the fact that the United States has the resources to end poverty in the world, yet millions in the U.S. don't have enough food to eat. So, in this country I believe our demands might be hands off China.
Saying that, when we look at the entire history of China, we see how the Chinese working class might be becoming the most militant working class in the world. As someone who is a member of the international working class, the struggles of Chinese workers, for me, are something to be inspired about.
