Fighting on all Fronts (51 page)

Fighting between Japanese and Reds continued. In Shanghai Japanese bayonets helped smash a strike of 50,000 workers in support of the Communists. When Okamura was at last convicted of being a war criminal, the Nationalist government stepped in not only to protect him from punishment but to employ him as an adviser!
¹¹¹

There were Japanese soldiers fighting on the side of the Communists but they had defected to join the fight against imperialism, seeing their real enemies as:

Japanese officers and other members of Japan’s ruling class… After all, the vast majority of them came from the farming and labouring classes in Japan, with a small admixture of students and merchants. Few had been treated with respect in Japan and, especially, in the Japanese Army, where there existed a rigid hierarchy in which inferiors, meaning those who came from the poor and had little education, were often treated with considerable brutality by their superiors. Inevitably, such men were profoundly impressed by the egalitarianism that was perhaps the most important characteristic of the Chinese Communist armies.
¹¹²

The unholy coalition of imperialist powers was short-lived as hostile brothers are bound to fall out. As long as Stalin believed the invasion of Manchuria by 630,000 of his troops guaranteed Russia strong influence, and aided the prospect of occupying Japan, the Nationalists were courted as allies. He therefore committed Russian forces to leaving Manchuria within three months.
¹¹³
But the advantages conferred on the US by the atom bomb and the swift peace Tokyo concluded with the US alone dashed these prospects.

Now that the KMT would be a client state of the US, Russian withdrawal was delayed so that, under the pretext that nine days of conflict with Japan justified seizure of “war booty”, Manchuria could be plundered on an astonishing scale. A contemporary report said:

In addition to taking stockpiles and certain complete industrial installations, the Soviets took by far the larger part of all functioning power generating and transforming equipment, electric motors, experimental plants, laboratories and hospitals. In machine tools, they took only the newest and best, leaving antiquated tools behind… By the end Manchuria’s electric power capacity was reduced by 71 percent, its metalworking by 80 percent and textiles by 75 percent.
¹¹⁴

The new Russian policy was one of malevolent neutrality. Treaty obligations meant they handed Manchuria’s cities to Chiang
¹¹⁵
but with the Cold War developing they did not want the Nationalists to be too strong. Therefore Moscow did not oppose the advance of Communist troops in the countryside and left behind captured Japanese stockpiles amounting to 700,000 rifles, 14,000 machine guns and hundreds of vehicles including tanks.
¹¹⁶

There has been debate about how calculated an act this was. Some see it as a Communist conspiracy hatched by Stalin and Mao. But according to one historian, although the Russians did not prevent CCP infiltration “it is by no means certain that they could have done so even if they had wanted to, for the guerrillas were innumerable, omnipresent and indistinguishable from the peasantry”.
¹¹⁷
Whatever the reason, the Manchurian windfall was a godsend to the CCP, which had popular support but always lacked the military hardware to make this effective.

Between 1946 and 1949 Mao’s forces went on to defeat Chiang’s Nationalist government and his US backers in what Schramm describes as “unquestionably one of the most striking examples in history of the victory of a smaller but dedicated and well-organised force enjoying popular support over a larger but unpopular force with poor morale and incompetent leadership”.
¹¹⁸
The Second World War with its combination of inter-imperialist rivalries and struggles against oppression and exploitation made a huge contribution to that outcome.

The Second World War encompassed two overlapping processes that exist within capitalist society at all times—the competitive struggle
between the capitalists themselves and class/social struggles between the capitalists and other sections of society. The usual sequence of events between 1939 and 1945 was that the struggle between capitalists (imperialist war) opened the way for powerful movements from below to develop. China provides an interesting variation to this. A prolonged revolutionary process had begun before the Second World War and the imperialist Sino-Japanese War was overlaid upon it.

A Marxist analysis of the Chinese Revolution needs to take account of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution. The argument is that the world progression of capitalism generates forces within economically backward countries which drive them to develop this social system domestically. To do so they need to break through limits imposed by archaic social and state structures.

Initially this led to bourgeois revolutions such as occurred in England in the 1640s and in France starting in 1789. Here, as capitalists were a relatively small minority in society, their political representatives (like Cromwell and Robespierre) had to mobilise the masses to overcome the feudal state. The New Model Army and the London mob, Jacobinism and the Parisian
sans-culottes
tore down the old regimes and established capitalist state power.

However, even in these early revolutions reliance on the activity of lower sections was potentially risky as they could begin to impose their own needs. In England egalitarian currents like the Levellers and Diggers emerged. In France the
enragés
stepped forward on numerous occasions to provoke radical changes threatening capitalist interests. Once state power was secured for capitalism, such popular movements were cut down. England’s monarchy was restored (though constitutionally hedged in). In France, Robespierre and the Jacobin leadership were executed in the so-called Thermidorian Reaction.

With the passage of time and the development of industry the gulf between rich and poor grew greater and the working class became more organised and conscious of its own interests. During the European revolutions of 1848, Marx already noticed that the developing German bourgeoisie feared those below it more than the feudal state:

at the moment when it menacingly confronted feudalism and absolutism, it saw…pitted against itself the proletariat and all sections of the middle class whose interests and ideas were related to those of the proletariat… Unlike the French bourgeoisie of 1789…it was inclined to betray the people and to compromise with the crowned representatives of the old society…
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Conversely, there could be moments when bourgeois revolutionary demands, such as national independence, were championed by other classes. As Trotsky wrote of the 1871 Paris Commune:

The Parisian workers took power…because they were compelled to do so by the bourgeoisie’s betrayal of national defence… It was only possible to defend Paris and the rest of France by arming the proletariat. But the revolutionary proletariat was a threat to the bourgeoisie, and an armed proletariat was an armed threat.
¹²⁰

At the beginning of the 20th century Trotsky related this understanding to the Russian situation to develop a fully rounded theory of permanent revolution whose validity was confirmed in 1917. The Russian bourgeoisie would not initiate or even support a bourgeois revolution and in their absence another section would take the lead. For reasons discussed above the peasantry could not fulfil this role but the working class could. That class, in accomplishing the tasks of the bourgeois revolution, would also impose its own demands and thus the bourgeois revolution would grow into socialist revolution—and so be “permanent”. This is what happened in Russia in 1917.

At its start the Chinese Revolution seemed to fit Russia’s pattern. Its bourgeoisie faced the obstacle of foreign imperialism and backward internal social relations such as warlordism. Like its Russian equivalent, fear of mobilising the masses outweighed the determination to overcome these barriers. This was graphically demonstrated in the KMT’s massacre of Shanghai’s workers in 1927. At that point China diverged from Russia’s pattern. Such was the scale of repression that the workers’ ability to champion the revolution was destroyed in the long term. Its leadership, the CCP, not only lost its link with the proletariat but was ideologically distorted by Stalinism.

The CCP leadership was, in class terms, independent of both workers and peasants. In future this grouping would form the embryo of a new ruling class set on achieving the tasks of the bourgeois revolution – independence, national unity and economic growth—using the tools of state power. For this reason Cliff described the rise of Mao to power as an example of “deflected permanent revolution” because it was not the working class but “the intelligentsia as the leader and unifier of the nation, and above all as manipulator of the masses” who shaped the process.
¹²¹

During the Sino-Japanese War in poverty-stricken Yenan the CCP leadership had little property to protect from those beneath it and therefore lacked the constraints on mass mobilisation experienced by
bourgeoisies ever since 1848. However, the result was ambiguous. This was not socialism but it cleared away much of the “muck of ages”
¹²²
and at the same time established a new, state capitalist ruling class.

This experience illuminates the forces at work during the Second World War in an unusual way, because it demonstrates the relevance of the theory of permanemt revolution to the war generally.

1. The theory of permanent revolution is usually applied when Third World countries struggle against imperialist oppression and various social forces are unleashed in the process. The onslaught of Germany in Europe aimed to shackle weaker countries to (Axis) imperialism, though in this case the intended victims were developed capitalist formations. So despite the massive economic contrast between China and France, for example, the issue of what forces might be unleashed at a national level to counter the imperialist threat was posed in a similar way.

2. Each bourgeoisie had to consider the degree to which it was prepared to work with, or indeed encourage, mass mobilisation from below in order to ward off the imperialist threat to its future, or collaborate with the enemy to avoid a domestic threat.

3. Movements from below varied from place to place. They were shaped by the character of the leadership and this determined the degree to which they merely mirrored the bourgeois revolutionary demand of national sovereignty or went beyond this to begin to express their own independent interests (and threaten “permanent revolution”). However, the dominance of Stalinism meant that nowhere did the working class step forward as an independent force capable of completing the process in the direction of socialism.

It would be going too far to suggest that all the people’s war and resistance movements of the Second World War were examples of “deflected permanent revolution”; but it is clear that the basic elements operating in China were not unrelated to global currents. There was (excuse the pun), no Chinese wall between events in undeveloped countries and the war as a whole.

1
      J Fenby,
Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the China He Lost
(Free Press, New York, 2003), p106.

2
      H Isaacs,
The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution
(Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1961), p32.

3
      R C North,
Moscow and Chinese Communists
(Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1953), p51.

4
      Quoted in Fenby, 2003, p114.

5
      E Snow,
Red Star over China
(Harmondsworth 1972), p456.

6
      Isaacs, 1961, p133.

7
      Isaacs, 1961, p179.

8
      Isaacs, 1961, p295.

9
      
The Voice of China. Speeches of Generalissimo and Madame Chiang Kai-shek
(London, 1943), pp 20, 50, 25.

10
    Quoted in So Wai Chor, “The Making of the Guomindang’s Japan Policy, 1932-1937: The Roles of Chiang Kai-Shek and Wang Jingwei”,
Modern China
, vol 28, no 2 (April 2002), p231. See also M Schaller,
The US Crusade in China 1938-1945
(New York, 1979), p42, who quotes Chiang in similar terms: “It is not the Japanese army that we fear, because our army is able to deal with it, but the defiant Communists.”

11
    So Wai Chor, 2002, p213. See also Hu Pu-yu,
A Brief History of Sino-Japanese War
(Taipei, 1974), p7.

12
    A Coogan, “The Volunteer Armies of North East China”,
History Today
, vol 43, no 7, 1992, p40.

13
    See P M Coble, “Chiang Kai-shek and the Anti-Japanese Movement in China: Zou Tao-fen and the National Salvation Association, 1931-1937”,
Journal of Asian Studies
, vol 44, no 2, February 1985, pp293-310.

14
    So Wai Chor, 2002, p240.

15
    Quoted in Fenby, 2003, p441; Isaacs, 1961, p298.

16
    Hu Pu-yu,
A Brief History of Sino-Japanese War
(Taipei, 1974), p7.

17
    J W Garver, “Chiang Kai-shek’s Quest for Soviet Entry into the Sino-Japanese War”, in
Political Science Quarterly
, vol 102, no 2 (summer, 1987), p32, and E Snow,
Scorched Earth
(Gollancz, London 1941), Part 1, p104.

18
    E Snow, 1972, p473.

19
    E Snow, 1941, Part 1, p105.

20
    J R Miller, “The Chiang-Stilwell Conflict, 1942-1944”,
Military Affairs
, vol 43, no 2 (April 1979), p59.

21
    R Spector, “The Sino-Japanese War in the Context of World History”, M Peattie, E Drea and H van de Ven (eds),
The Battle for China
(Stanford 2011), p473.

22
    Quoted Fenby, 2003, p425.

23
    See Miller, April 1979.