Red Star over China (51 page)

One had to remember that the Chinese Communists' adherence to the Comintern, and unity with the U.S.S.R., were voluntary, and could have been liquidated at any time by the Chinese from within. The role of the Soviet Union for them had been most potent as a living example that bred hope and faith. The Chinese Reds stoutly believed that the Chinese revolution was not isolated, and that hundreds of millions of workers, not only in Russia but throughout the world, were anxiously watching them, and when the time came would emulate them, even as they themselves had emulated the comrades in Russia. In the day of Marx and Engels it might have been correct to say that “the workers have no country,” but the Chinese Communists believed that, besides their own little bases of power, they had a mighty fatherland in the Soviet Union.

“The Soviet Government in China,” read the Constitution adopted at the first All-China Soviet Congress, “declares its readiness to form a revolutionary united front with the world proletariat and all oppressed nations, and
proclaims the Soviet Union, the land of proletarian dictatorship, to be its loyal ally”.
How much the words italicized meant to the Chinese soviets, which in truth most of the time were completely isolated geographically, economically, and politically, was hard to understand for any Westerner who had never known a Chinese Communist.

This idea of having behind them a great ally—even though it was less and less validated by demonstrations of positive support from the Soviet Union—was of primary importance to the morale of the Chinese Reds. It imparted to their struggle the universality of a religious cause, and they deeply cherished it. When they shouted, “Long Live the World Revolution!” and “Proletarians of All Lands, Unite!” it was an idea that permeated all their teaching and faith, and in it they reaffirmed their allegiance to the dream of a Socialist world brotherhood.

It seemed to me that these concepts had already shown that they could change Chinese behavior. I never suffered from any “antiforeignism”
in the Reds' attitude toward me. They were certainly anti-imperialist, but racial prejudice seemed to have been sublimated in class antagonism that knew no national boundaries. Even their anti-Japanese agitation was not directed against the Japanese on a racial basis. In their propaganda the Reds constantly emphasized that they opposed only the Japanese militarists, capitalists, and other “Fascist oppressors,” and that the Japanese masses were their potential allies. Indeed, they derived great encouragement from that conviction. This changing of national prejudice from racism to class antagonism was no doubt traceable to the education in Russia of scores of the Chinese Red leaders, who had attended Sun Yat-sen University, or the Red Academy, or some other school for international cadres of communism, and had returned as teachers to their own people.

One example of their internationalism was the intense interest with which the Reds followed the events of the Spanish Civil War. Bulletins were issued in the press, were pasted up in the meeting rooms of village soviets, were announced to the armies at the front. Special lectures were given by the political department on the cause and significance of the Spanish war, and the “people's front” in Spain was contrasted with the “united front” in China. Mass meetings of the populace were summoned, demonstrations were held, and public discussions were encouraged. It was quite surprising sometimes to find, even far back in the mountains, Red farmers who knew a few rudimentary facts about such things as the Italian conquest of Abyssinia and the German-Italian “invasion” of Spain, and spoke of these powers as the “Fascist allies” of their enemy, Japan. Despite their geographical isolation, these rustics now knew much more about that aspect of world politics, thanks to radio news and wall newspapers and Communist lecturers and propagandists, than the rural population anywhere else in China.

The strict discipline of Communist method and organization had seemingly produced among Chinese Marxists a type of cooperation and a suppression of individualism which the average “Old China Hand,” or treaty-port merchant, or missionary who “knew Chinese psychology” would have found impossible to believe without witnessing for himself. In their political life the existence of the individual was an atomic pulse in the social whole, the mass, and must bend to its will, either consciously in the role of leadership, or unconsciously as part of the material demiurge. There had been disputes and internecine struggles among the Communists, but none severe enough to deal a fatal injury to either the army or the Party.

Had Nanking been able at any time to split their military and political strength into contradictory and permanently warring factions, as it did
with all other Opposition groups—as Chiang Kai-shek did with his own rivals for power within the Kuomintang—the task of Communist suppression might have been rewarded with final success. But its attempts were failures. For example, a few years before, Nanking had hoped to utilize the worldwide Stalin-Trotsky controversy to divide the Chinese Communists, but although so-called Chinese “Trotskyites” did appear, they never developed any important mass influence or following.

The Reds had generally discarded much of the ceremony of traditional Chinese etiquette, and their psychology and character were quite different from our old conceptions of Chinese. They were direct, frank, simple, undevious, and scientific-minded. They were also implacable enemies of the old Chinese familism.
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With their zealous adoration of the Soviet Union there had naturally been a lot of copying and imitating of foreign ideas, institutions, methods, and organizations. The Chinese Red Army was constructed on Russian military lines, and much of its tactical knowledge derived from Russian experience. Social organizations in general followed the pattern laid down by Russian Bolshevism. Many Red songs were put to Russian music and widely sung in the soviet districts.
Suwei-ai
—Chinese for “soviet”—was only one example of many words transliterated directly from Russian into Chinese.

But in their borrowing there was much adaptation; few Russian ideas or institutions survived without drastic changes to suit the milieu in which they operated. The empirical process of a decade eliminated indiscriminate wholesale importations, and also resulted in the introduction of peculiarly Chinese features. A process of imitation and adaptation of the West had, of course, been going on in the bourgeois world of China, too—for there was very little left even of poetry of the ancient feudal heritage, that “scrap material of a great history” as Spengler calls it, which the Chinese were able to use in building either a modern bourgeois or a Socialist society capable of grappling with the vast new demands of the country. While the Reds leaned heavily on Russia for organizational methods with youth, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek not only used Italian bombing planes to destroy them, but also borrowed from the Y.M.C.A. in building his anti-Communist New Life movement.

And finally, of course, the political ideology, tactical line, and theoretical leadership of the Chinese Communists had been under the close guidance, if not positive direction, of the Communist International. Great
benefits undoubtedly accrued to the Chinese Reds from sharing the collective experience of the Russian Revolution, and from the leadership of the Comintern. But it was also true that the Comintern could be held responsible for serious reverses suffered by the Chinese Communists in the anguish of their growth.

It is possible to divide the history of Sino-Russian relations from 1923 to 1937 roughly into three periods. The first, from 1923 to 1927, was a period of triple alliance between the Soviet Union and the Nationalist revolutionaries, consisting of strange bedfellows aligned under the banners of the Kuomintang and the Communist parties, and aiming at the overthrow by revolution of the then extant government of China, and the restoration of China's complete sovereignty. That enterprise ended with the triumph of the right-wing Kuomintang, the founding of the National Government at Nanking, the latter's compromise with the colonial power, and the severance of Sino-Russian relations.

From 1927 to 1933 there was a period of isolation of Russia from (Nationalist) China, and its complete insulation against Russian influence. This era closed when Moscow resumed diplomatic relations with Nanking late in 1933. The third period began with a lukewarm Nanking-Moscow
rapprochement,
embarrassed considerably by the continued heavy civil war between Nanking and the Chinese Communists. It was to end dramatically early in 1937, when a partial reconciliation was effected between the Communists and the Kuomintang, with new possibilities opened up for Sino-Russian cooperation.

The three periods of Sino-Russian relationship mentioned above accurately reflected also the changes in the character of the Comintern and its stages of transition. It is impossible here to enter into the complex causes, domestic and international, which brought about those changes, both in the Soviet Union and in the Comintern, but it is pertinent to see
how in the main they had affected, and were affected by, the Chinese Revolution.

The 1927 crisis of the Chinese Revolution coincided with a crisis in Russia, and in the Comintern, expressed in the struggle between Trotskyism and Stalinism for theoretical and practical control of Russia. Had Stalin been able to advance his slogan, “socialism in one country” much earlier than 1924, had the issue been fought out and had he been able to dominate the Comintern before then, quite possibly the “intervention” in China might never have begun. Such a speculation in any case was idle now. When Stalin did develop his fight, the line in China had already been cast. The active military, political, financial, and intellectual collaboration given to the Chinese Nationalist Revolution was until 1926 under the direction chiefly of Zinoviev, who was chairman of the Communist International. Then from early 1926 onward Stalin became chiefly responsible for the affairs and policies of the Comintern as well as the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and it was nowhere disputed that he had tightened his grasp on both organizations ever since.

Thus it was Stalin who led the Comintern that gave the Chinese Communists their tactical line and “directives” in 1926 and during the catastrophe of the spring of 1927. During those fateful months, in which disaster gathered above the heads of the Chinese Communists, Stalin's line was subjected to continuous bombardment from the Opposition, dominated by Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev. While he was Comintern chairman, Zinoviev had fully supported the line of Communist cooperation with the Kuomintang, but he violently attacked this same line as carried out by Stalin. Particularly after Chiang Kai-shek's first “treachery”—the abortive attempt at a
coup d'état
in Canton in 1926—Zinoviev predicted an inevitable counterrevolution in which the national bourgeoisie would compromise with imperialism and “betray the masses.”

At least a year before Chiang Kai-shek's second and successful
coup d'état,
Zinoviev began demanding the separation of the Communists from the Kuomintang, “the party of the national bourgeoisie,” which he now considered incapable of carrying out the two main tasks of the revolution—anti-imperialism, i.e. the overthrow of foreign domination of China, and “antifeudalism,” or the destruction of the landlord-gentry rule in rural China. Just as early, Trotsky began urging the formation of soviets and an independent Chinese Red Army. The Opposition in general foretold the failure of the “bourgeois-democratic” revolution—all they hoped for in this period—if Stalin's line was continued.

Stalin defended himself, after the debacle, by ridiculing as non-Marxist the Trotskyist contentions that the tactical line of the Comintern had been the main cause of the failure. “Comrade Kamenev,” declared
Stalin, “said that the policy of the Communist International was responsible for the defeat of the Chinese Revolution, and that we ‘bred Cavaignacs in China.' … How can it be asserted that the tactics of a party can abolish or reverse the relation of class forces? What are we to say of people who forget the relation of class forces in time of revolution, and who try to explain everything by the tactics of a party? Only one thing can be said of such people—that they have abandoned Marxism.”

Trotsky required no help from me in framing appropriate replies to Stalin's self-exculpations, but as his wit had not prevented the earlier destruction of Communist regimes in Hungary and Bavaria, nor the general defeat of the Comintern's hopes throughout the East, so it did not save the Chinese Communists from a catastrophe which all but destroyed the Party. Only Stalin won—that is, he drove Trotsky from the temple—and consequently Stalin dominated future activities of the Comintern in China—which for a time were practically nil. Russian organs in China were closed, Russian Communists were killed or driven from the country, the flow of financial, military, and political help from Russia dwindled. The Chinese Communist Party was thrown into great confusion, and for a time its interior leadership lost contact with the Comintern. The rural soviet movement and (Mao's) Chinese Red Army began spontaneously, and they did not, in fact, get much applause from Russia till after the Sixth Congress, when the Communist International gave its postnatal sanction.
²

After 1927 it became impossible for Russia to have any direct physical connection with the Chinese Red areas, which had no seaport and were entirely surrounded by a ring of hostile troops. Whereas in the past there had been scores of Comintern workers in China, there were now two or three, often almost isolated from society as a whole, seldom able to risk a stay of more than a few months. Whereas a large flow of Russian gold and arms had formerly gone to Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists, now a trickle reached the Reds. And whereas the whole Soviet Union had backed the Great Revolution of 1925–27, the Chinese Communist movement was now aided only by a Comintern which could no longer command the vast resources of the “base of the world revolution,” but had to limp along as a kind of poor stepchild which might be officially disinherited whenever it did anything malaprop.