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From The Militant, Vol. V No. 16, 19 April 1941, p. 1.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Signature of the Moscow-Tokyo “neutrality” pact followed by a day an anniversary that is little-remembered: the anniversary of April 12, 1927, the date of Chiang- Kai-shek’s Shanghai coup d’etat.
Veterans of the Chinese workers’ struggle, scattered on anti-Japanese fighting fronts or silently holding to their positions within the occupied zone, have not forgotten the events of April 12. Stalin’s new deal with Tokyo, which cannot fail to affect the war in China, must have given particular sharpness to those memories.
On April 12, 1927, Chiang Kai-shek, the “reliable ally” of Joseph Stalin, turned with unimaginable ferocity upon the Chinese mass movement, and upon the working class of Shanghai, its foremost vanguard. In the slaughter that began that dawn in Shanghai’s streets and continued through months and years, scores of thousands of workers and peasants in Chinese cities and in the countryside, went down before the Kuomintang terror. Taught by Stalin’s Comintern to look upon Chiang as the trusted leader of the revolutionary movement, the masses were caught totally unprepared for the blow. A movement which had swept the country in three years, climaxing in a victorious proletarian insurrection which had conquered Shanghai, was “splattered into froth.” The balance of power in Asia abruptly swung sharply again to the side of the imperialists. China was left open to Japan’s invasion, which began only four years later.
Stalin, seeking Chinese allies against the imperialists, preferred to rely upon Chiang Kai-shek and the bourgeoisie rather than on the proletarian revolution. Stalin did that again in 1936. Now the cycle has run another course. Stalin has come to terms with the Japanese invaders and what new traps this pact sets for the Chinese struggle we shall soon enough know. The cycle was paralleled in Germany where under Stalin’s leadership the powerful Communist Party in 1933 opened the road to Hitler and accepted defeat for the German proletariat. Six years later came the Hitler-Stalin pact ... and the new imperialist war.
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