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China & World Revolution
From International Socialism (1st series), No.78, May 1975, pp.8-10.
FOR OVER 150 years, China decayed under the impact of foreign imperialism – British, French, Russian, German, American, and finally Japanese. The results were a frightening impoverishment of the mass of the people, the collapse of the imperial regime in 1911, and a long drawn out period of political disintegration closed by Japanese occupation of the most important areas of the country and the Second World War.
Initially, it was the British in the nineteenth century who made the running in the competition between the major powers to grab parts of China. British merchants drained silver out of the country in payment for the opium they pumped in. Whenever the Imperial authorities tried to suppress the opium trade, British and French bayonets prised the country open a little wider (as happened after the infamous Opium Wars of 1842 and 1858). The foreigners by force of arms compelled the Empire to legalise opium, to open the hinterland to European traders and cede, in part or whole, the key coastal cities. Once the Suez Canal was opened and the steamship introduced on the Far Eastern run, the whole tempo of commerce changed. Chinese trade doubled in value between 1885 and 1894. Henceforth, the acid of commercial capitalism rotted the fibres of the country just as opium rotted the minds of its people. The only slight protection for China was the failure of any one capitalist power to take over the whole country – their greedy rivalry to some extent checked each other.
Many of the Chinese upper classes, the nobility and civil servants, moved into the trade at the coastal cities, scavenging after the European merchants. Corruption became rife. The cash generated in trade and bribes moved back from the cities into the purchase of land or rural moneylending, expropriating the peasantry. The central government decayed, and local gangsters, bandits, the notorious secret societies, a combination of nobles and an indigenous Mafiosi, took over local power. The political paralysis meant that the government could no longer maintain the vast irrigation and drainage systems without which the farmers could not survive. The land became increasingly subject to disasters – floods, famine, drought and plague. Mass pauperisation became the character of the society.
The Imperial administration was eaten from within by the depredations and bribery of the foreigners, merchants and diplomats. Rebellions increased in frequency. China has a long tradition of peasant rebellions, and one of the greatest – the Taiping Rebellion – began in 1850. Masses of peasants swept through the central provinces, even as far as the gates of Peking. The rebels set up an entirely new regime in the Yangtse valley that lasted some eleven years. The British and French saw their opportunity. They attacked, sacking the Emperor’s Summer Palace, in effect taking over the Imperial government. Then General Gordon turned on the Taiping rebels and slaughtered them.
The British and French were, however, being overtaken by other powers. As the Manchu dynasty weakened, Tsarist Russia took over more and more of the territory in the north and west. In the 1890s, the Japanese provoked a war with China in order to seize Korea, the enormous island of Taiwan (Formosa), a number of ports, and impose punitive damages on China for the privilege of losing its territory. The Japanese now dominated south Manchuria, and Tsarist Russia north Manchuria – the result was the Russo-Japanese war of 1905, much the most important consequence of which was the 1905 revolution in Russia.
In 1911, the inevitable happened. After 250 years of rule, the dynasty fell. Even the weapons of the foreigners could no longer hold it up. There was no force, group or class capable of taking over the whole country. The nobility was divided and corrupted. The merchants and capitalists had no popular backing and were dependent on the foreigner. The foreigners strengthened their control, preventing national unification by playing off one local warlord against another.
Rarely has a country been brought so low. The First World War brought everything to a head and broke the spell. There was a boom in the coastal cities because European imports were cut off by the war and Chinese capitalists opened up their own production. A Chinese capitalist class began to emerge as a separate force. In 1917, the Russian Revolution and the Bolshevik rejection of the Tsarist ‘Unequal Treaties’ with China roused enormous enthusiasm among the nationalist middle classes. The war boom created a new city proletariat, responsive to the new ideas. Outside the cities, the terrible impoverishment of the peasantry continued, and banditry spread as the only form of rural defence.
Japan hoped to use the First World War to consolidate her dominant position in China. While her predatory rivals were tearing each other to pieces in Europe, she took the opportunity in 1915 to impose on China ‘Twenty One Demands’. In effect, these would have reduced the country to a Japanese colony. At the end of the war, the conference to carve up the world among the victors was held at Versailles. There was much talk by the victors of the ‘right of national self-determination’ for all peoples; countries would be created that corresponded to the wishes of the people. The Chinese who were aware of the conference expected that at least it would roll back the dominance of the foreign powers. It did nothing of the kind. As a result, there was an explosion of rage in China. It developed first among students in what was called the May 4 Movement, and spread quickly through the cities. It filled the sails of the small and hitherto ineffective nationalist party, the Kuomintang, and led to the setting up of a small Communist Party. Finally, it spread out to assist in the rapid organisation of workers in trade unions and the setting up of militant peasant associations. At long last, there was developing a force of popular power which could cut through the mass of warring generals and gangsters which paralysed the country.
The new Communist International in Moscow took a particular interest in China. Lenin and its other leaders held that an anti-imperialist revolution in the major areas of imperial control like China and India would give great assistance to the workers’ revolution in Europe. The Russian government offered much help to the Kuomintang, and later, after Lenin’s death, the Comintern instructed the Chinese Communist Party to ally itself with the Kuomintang. Joseph Stalin as leader of the Soviet Communist Party and dominant force in the Comintern from the middle twenties, argued that the Chinese working class, even if it was in alliance with the peasantry, would be too small to defeat imperialism in China. This was quite contrary to what happened in Tsarist Russia itself where the small working class did indeed seize power. The Chinese working class, Stalin said, must enter an alliance with other classes, the capitalists and landlords of the Kuomintang, enter what was called ‘a Four Class Bloc’. In this way, all the nationalist forces would be united against their common enemy. The Kuomintang under its most famous leader, Sun Yat-sen, advanced the slogans of nationalism (but with concessions to keep foreign powers well-disposed), democracy (but the vote for the masses was only a long term aim) and people’s livelihood (under Chinese capitalism).
Stalin had high hopes of the Kuomintang. Within it, the Russians supported a particular man whom they hoped would inherit the leadership of the Kuomintang on the death of Sun Yat-sen. And their nominee, a man who had been taken to Moscow for his military education, did indeed become the head of the Kuomintang. His name was Chiang Kai-shek. Chiang was happy to accept Russian support, and to accept the popular backing which the Communist Party brought him – but only until such time as he had enough power to dispense with them. When the Kuomintang military forces were strong enough to begin the reconquest of the rest of China, Chiang’s forces fell upon the Communists and slaughtered or gaoled them. Between 1927 and 1930, the Party suffered 30,000 killed. The Party membership dropped from around 100,000 to 10,000, and it was entirely driven out of the cities.
The contradictions of the ‘Four Class Bloc’ were shown most vividly in the destruction of the strongest section of the Chinese working class, the Shanghai workers. On Tuesday, 12 April 1927, the Kuomintang Northern Expeditionary army under Chiang approached the city. Chou En-lai and the Communist Party prepared a triumphal greeting for him by calling a General Strike. 350,000 workers responded, and the city was paralysed, awaiting liberation by the army. The Shanghai capitalists mobilised gangs of toughs to counterattack. They sent urgent messages with promises of large bribes to Chiang, urging him not to enter the city lest his troops be infected with the virus of Bolshevism. When the gangsters had done their worst, the Kuomintang took the city. Their troops publicly beheaded 5,000 workers in the squares of Shanghai.
Meanwhile, Chiang guarded his flank. In the year in which he launched his offensive on the Communist Party, he had secret talks with the Japanese. He offered them complete control of Manchuria and Mongolia if they would support him while he consolidated his control of the rest of China (known as ‘south of the wall’, or inside the Great Wall). The Japanese were not unhappy to play with Chiang while it suited their purpose. In 1932, they seized Manchuria, setting up a puppet state called Manchukuo, and began a steady penetration westwards. In 1937, they struck south through the wall, taking Peking and beginning the conquest of the heartlands of China. Simultaneously, they attacked from Shanghai and sacked the then capital, Nanking, in one of the most terrible massacres of modern times.
At each stage, Chiang fell back, more concerned to preserve his military hardware than risk it in batde. Many of his armies were already corrupt and demoralised. Chiang was driven out of the eastern provinces, until he finally reached his wartime capital in the west, Chungking. There he settled down to sit the war out. For his war had become the Second World War, and he relied on the Americans to defeat the Japanese for him so that he could then inherit all without losing a tank or a plane.
The only people who offered some real resistance were the small forces of the Communist Party. Those few who survived the holocaust of 1927 to 1930, regrouped in a remote area, the Kiangsi border mountains. They were driven out of there by the Kuomintang, decimated in the Long March of flight, but finally reached a sanctuary in a very remote and backward area, famous now as Yenan. From there, they began operations, and one of their first active aims was to foment guerilla attacks on the Japanese forces from behind their lines. The Japanese occupation was of the utmost ferocity, and this produced a steady stream of young peasant recruits to the Communist armed bands which became the People’s Liberation Army. The Communists grew, winning popular support. The second World War gave them the opportunity to become for the first time a serious military contender for power against the Kuomintang.
After the war, there was a race between the two protagonists to secure as much territory as possible as the Japanese were driven out by the Americans (who of course did all they could to ensure that Chiang inherited). But by now the Kuomintang had nothing to offer even to its capitalist backers. Hyper-inflation, the lack of even a bare minimum of administration, made it impossible for Chinese business to operate. The Kuomintang armies dissolved or went over to the People’s Liberation Army, while the generals grabbed what they could and fled to Taiwan, Hong Kong or further afield. Chiang’s Republic disintegrated, and the People’s Republic was born.
It was created in appalling conditions. The tasks of elementary reconstruction, let alone improvement, were enormous tasks. Neither could be undertaken singlemindedly because the world outside continued to threaten.
Even as the Communist Party was launching the final phase of its attack, war broke out on China’s southern border with Vietnam between the French and the Vietminh of Ho Chi Minh. Churchill, on the other side of the world, declared a world-wide Cold War, and the United States began to rearm. American forces continued to hold much of the east Pacific coastline – Korea, Japan, Okinawa, Taiwan, the Philippines. It was the US fleet that blocked the attempts of the new Chinese government to complete the conquest of China and finally rout the Kuomintang by invading its last province, the island of Taiwan. Finally, the United States challenged Russia and now China to a war for the control of Korea.
The country was extremely poor and disorganised. For example, the average Russian in 1928 (before Stalin began his massive industrialisation programme) had three or four times the income of the average Chinese in 1952. In terms of available food, the average Russian in 1928 had more than twice as much as the average Chinese of 1952. The value of production per head in Britain in 1801 has been reckoned at between £77 and £96; in China, in 1949, it was around £19.
Industry had to be restored, a devastated transport system reconstructed, a decayed or wrecked system of irrigation and drainage works rebuilt, while maintaining a military establishment capable of repulsing the United States and its allies. In a quarter of a century, it has been done. By comparison to conditions before 1949, the change wrought in the lives and livelihood of millions of Chinese is truly remarkable. The imperialists were kept out and the country transformed almost out of recognition.
But it is still very poor. To illustrate how poor, the New China News Agency in 1972 gave an account of a commune in Hopei province. There the average production of each person was valued at £38.25 per year. The commune was heavily dependent on supplies from outside. City workers are much better off. The average wages per year 6f a Shanghai shipyard worker was reckoned at £161.50, or just over £3.00 per week. Of course, this does not show the real value of wages, for prices are kept very low (rice is said to cost about £11.50 per person per year, and housing, water and services, about £16.9 each year). But this is no affluent society. Even with the massive changes that have been made, one very sympathetic economist reckons that it will be a dramatic achievement if the average Chinese income (city and country incomes combined) reaches about £77 per year, or £1.48 per week, by the 1980s (Deleyne, pp.188-9).
The country desperately needs to increase its output. The numbers employed in agriculture at very low levels of productivity remain enormous. To increase their output, to increase the national output, needs capital equipment. Yet defence imposes an intolerable burden on what capital equipment there is. Ultimately, there is no alternative to economic development, to rapid industrialisation.
China & World Revolution
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Last updated: 2.3.2008