90 Years of the Chinese Communist Party – Part One

Chen DuxiuToday, July 1^st, 2011, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) celebrates its 90^thanniversary.
During this lengthy period it has played a decisive role in the most
profound and dramatic changes in Chinese and world history. The
struggles and heroic sacrifices of hundreds of millions of Chinese
peasants and workers in the past expressed themselves through this
party.

For these reasons we must rank the CCP as an important
political force in world history. Marx asked even in 1853, “can mankind
fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state
of Asia?”

Today, however, how do we assess the role of the party
in Chinese society, after all these decades and transformations that the
party and China have undergone? Where is the CCP going? Before we can
answer this question we must first look at the remarkable history of
this party as it has intertwined with China’s over the past 90 years.

The
Chinese revolution of 1949 (preceded by a botched revolution in 1925-7
in which the newly formed CCP played a key role) stands as one of the
greatest proofs of the proposition that, in the final analysis,
it is the development of the means of production which determines the
political superstructure of a society. For despite the heavy weight of
the Stalin led Communist International (Comintern) on the burgeoning
Chinese revolution, which artificially imposed onto the CCP a false
political line conjured up to suit the interests and prejudices of the
Russian bureaucracy rather than the needs of the Chinese revolution, the
victory of the Chinese revolution could only be delayed. Although it is
true that the peculiar course of development that the CCP subsequently
undertook under erroneous direction from Stalin, that is heavy
bureaucratisation and the abandoning of the working class for the
peasantry, profoundly altered the social and economic history of China,
nevertheless the underlying and unavoidable trend, visible since the
1840s, of the economic development of China under pressure from
imperialism, creating a powerful working class capable of expropriating
capitalism, asserted itself in spite of and through the political
mistakes of the Comintern in Russia. Such were the contradictions of
capitalism in China that all the political errors and meddling from
Stalin could not hold back the course of history.

Opium Wars and Imperial Humiliation

Combat at Guangzhou (Canton)The
period which preceded the founding of the CCP in 1921 was the re-entry
of China onto the world stage and its subordination to imperialism,
primarily British imperialism. China was on the inexorable path to
social revolution ever since Britain dragged it into the world market by
means of the gunboat in the criminal Opium Wars (1839-42 and 1856-60).
Britain and its East India Company suffered a trade imbalance with China
even then (some things never change!). The British used the battering
ram of addictive opium, grown in India and sold illegally to the
Chinese, to prise open the Chinese market. But as always, they needed
the auxiliary force of guns to get the trade terms they desired. But
blinded as ever by short sighted greed, the British could not understand
the corrosive effect this trade was to have on Chinese society.

“Besides
this immediate economical consequence, the bribery connected with opium
smuggling has entirely demoralised the Chinese State officers in the
Southern provinces. Just as the Emperor was wont to be considered the
father of all China, so his officers were looked upon as sustaining the
paternal relation to their respective districts. But this patriarchal
authority, the only moral link embracing the vast machinery of the
State, has gradually been corroded by the corruption of those officers,
who have made great gains by conniving at opium smuggling” (Marx, Revolution in China and in Europe, 1853)

This
violent (and narcotic!) entry of capitalism through the barrel of the
British cannon really spelt the end for the Manchu Qing dynasty and
traditional Chinese society, which was to meet its final doom in 1911.
Marx was already speaking of the existence of the Chinese revolution in
1853, and its interdependence with the European revolution. The decisive
question was, what would be the character of the revolution, what would
Qing despotism be replaced with and by which social force? The crisis
in Chinese society which British imperialism engendered, led directly to
a revolutionary movement at this time, which Marx thought could even
have sparked off a revolution in Europe, “it may seem a very strange,
and a very paradoxical assertion that the next uprising of the people of
Europe… may depend more probably on what is now passing in the
Celestial Empire [China]… than on any other political cause that now
exists” (Ibid). The Taiping Rebellion, as it was known, swept through
China, leading to what is thought to be around 20 million deaths, the
most violent civil war ever and possibly the most bloody war of the 19^th
Century. It threatened the very existence of the Chinese state thanks
to the popularity of its programme – land socialisation, suppression of
private trade and the abolition of foot binding. Its ranks were drawn
from the peasantry and the town labourers. These class based demands
were brought to the fore thanks precisely to the devastating economic
impact of trade with Britain.

“The tribute to be paid
to England after the unfortunate war of 1840 [i.e. the sanctions imposed
onto China after its defeat in the 1^st Opium War], the great
unproductive consumption of opium, the drain of the precious metals by
this trade, the destructive influence of foreign competition on native
manufactures, the demoralised condition of the public administration,
produced two things: the old taxation became more burdensome and
harassing, and new taxation was added to the old. Thus in a decree of
the Emperor, dated Peking, Jan. 5, 1853, we find orders given to the
viceroys and governors of the southern provinces of Wuchang and Hanyang
to remit and defer the payment of taxes, and especially not in any case
to exact more than the regular amount; for otherwise, says the decree,
‘how will the poor people be able to bear it?’ ” (Ibid)

Capital,
with its cheap goods and superior technology developed thousands of
miles away in accordance with a completely different social environment,
did not respect the millennia old settled structure of Chinese society;
instead it violently shook it up with wanton disregard for the
consequences.

“The widespread use of opium caused a
flow of wealth from the countryside to the towns and led to an alarming
contraction of the internal market. The silver shortage caused by the
drain resulted in a 20 to 30 percent depreciation of the copper currency
in common use and a sharp rise in the cost of living. Debased coinage
came into use. Foreign cotton goods and other commodities drove Chinese
handicrafts to the wall, especially in the Southern provinces. The
weavers who had produced the 3,359,000 pieces of cloth exported in 1819
lost their means of livelihood when the exports dropped to 30,600 pieces
in 1833 and almost to zero in the next three decades… The
accumulative result of all these agencies of dissolution was mass
pauperisation and the creation of a large floating population.” (Isaacs,
The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution)

So at
this end of society the effects of imperialism were destructive,
continually creating the social conditions and the foot soldiers for
revolution and a new, modern China. These are the real beginnings of the
Chinese Communist Party. But at the other end of society, the effects
of this trade were profoundly conservative and even regressive. The
wealth of British capitalism ‘trickled down’ to the old Chinese ruling
class, leading to an exaggeration of feudal relations and a
strengthening of feudal power backed up with British cannons.

“Among
these merchants and officials, a new class took shape, the class of
compradores, brokers for foreign capital on the Chinese market… The
commanding economic positions the foreigners occupied blocked the
channel of indigenous, independent capitalist development. The wealth
accumulated by these Chinese merchants and officials went not into
capitalist enterprise but back into land. Most of these individuals
stemmed to begin with from the landed gentry and they used their money
to increase their family holdings. This process visibly hastened the
growth of large landed estates and the expropriation of smaller
landholders… The profits went back not only into land purchase but
into loans at usurious rates to the peasants, who increasingly had to
borrow to bridge the gap between their decreasing incomes and their
rising costs and taxes… the peasant could not adapt himself to the
change. He was simply ruined by it… He not only could not produce
enough to provide him with a surplus, but had to go into debt for
fertilizer, for food to tide him over until harvest time, for seed, for
the rental and use of implements. For these he mortgaged away not only
his crop but his land… losing his land, he became a tenant. To the
landlord he had to surrender 40 to 70 percent of his crop and a
substantial additional percentage, often in special dues, gifts, and
obligations preserved from the dim feudal past, including the duty of
free labour on special occasions fixed by ancient tradition… This
[landlord] class, vitally concerned with preserving all the inequalities
on the land from which it profited, became one of the chief instruments
of foreign penetration and control.” [Ibid]

No
wonder millions of pauperised peasants and labourers for hire signed up
to fight the regime. The Taiping Rebellion was accompanied with land
seizures by peasants. Within its conquered areas attempts were
apparently made to stimulate an internal market, agricultural
production, develop exports and to suppress the opium trade. In other
words, it bore signs of developing into a classic bourgeois revolution,
whose main tasks should be to establish national sovereignty and a
national market, and thoroughgoing agrarian reform, precisely those
tasks most desperately needed in China at the time. But rather than
develop in accordance with its own indigenous impulses, as an Asian
edition of the same bourgeois revolutions that transformed Europe in
previous centuries, Chinese history was pushed down a different course
thanks to the existence of the world market and British and French guns.
The Taiping Rebellion was bloodily defeated in 1864, after 14 years of
struggle, thanks in large part to imperialist intervention. Military and
naval forces under the control of General Charles Gordon (‘Chinese
Gordon’) were decisive in winning key battles. But why would the British
bourgeoisie wish to halt a potential bourgeois revolution like that
which had brought themselves to power in their homeland? Because the
rebellion’s threatening of the lucrative status quo, the threat of
Chinese capitalism developing independently, and the threat of ending
the opium trade, were threats to the most powerful actor on the world
market, Britain. Thus the supranational character of a powerful
imperialist nation halted and altered the national development of
another.

So in the historical background to the Chinese revolution
and the creation of the CCP, we find an enormous validation of the
Marxist proposition that capitalism develops into a world market, which
is “not a sum of national parts” but “a mighty and independent reality
which has been created by the international division of labour”. The
world market sped up but also truncated the development of China. Rather
than repeat the history of England or France, having its own national
revolution like theirs, China found itself as a part of an already
existing world market. Marx considered the creation of the capitalist
world market as having been achieved precisely with the inclusion of
China in that market, “the particular task of bourgeois society is the
establishment of the world market… as the world is round, this seems
to have been completed by the colonisation of California and Australia
and the opening up of China and Japan.” Thus the tasks of the Chinese
revolution fell to the CCP as a particular phase of the world socialist
revolution against the masters of this market, rather than as the task
of establishing a Chinese national market.

Xinhai Revolution and the end of the Qing Dynasty

Sun Yat SenBy the beginning of the 20^th
century, dissatisfaction with the old regime and a burning desire for
change were reaching boiling point. There was a ferment of discussion in
the youth on how to revive, renew and modernise China. The moral
corrosion and undermining of the traditional state apparatus led to
enormous dissatisfaction amongst the mostly privileged youth who would
previously have enrolled in the Imperial exams for entry into the state
apparatus. At first the dominant idea in these layers was to reform the
Chinese state so that it could be a constitutional monarchy or modern
parliamentary system like Britain or the USA. But it became apparent
that the old regime would not reform itself and was determined to cling
to its power and privileges. As a result, various revolutionary
organisations and journals proliferated, especially in the South and
East of the country. By and large, these organisations set themselves
the goal of overthrowing the Qing Dynasty and establishing a national
Chinese republic. Socialist, and certainly Marxist ideas, had not yet
really penetrated into Chinese society. From the perspective of
posterity, two individuals and their respective organisations/journals
stand out from the first decade of the 20^th century – Sun Yat
Sen and the Tongmenghui (latterly the Guomindang or Kuomintang, the
nationalist party still leading Taiwan), and Chen Duxiu and his Anhui Common Speech Journal and New Youth Magazine.

By
1911 these republican, bourgeois revolutionaries were in the ascendency
and had conquered Wuchang in Central China after a failed uprising in
Guangzhou (Canton). This is known as the Xinhai revolution. The ruling
Qing Dynasty had rotted from within, so thorough was its decline that it
could find no source of strength even in the nobility. In 1912, the
Emperor abdicated and a republic was declared, and governments the world
over recognised the new regime. It would appear that China had finally
had its bourgeois revolution, and the task of establishing real
sovereignty based on a Chinese national market and land reform could
begin in haste. Yet only nine years later, the Chinese Communist Party
was to be formed and within another four years, a second, far more
comprehensive revolution would begin. Why?

In the bourgeois
revolutions of England and France, the capitalist class stood at the
head of the nation, leading a genuine ‘urban democracy’ that united
behind it the labourers and semi-proletarians of the cities, and the
peasants of the countryside, both of which were the ground troops of the
revolution. Cromwell’s New Model Army was a democratic, revolutionary
army composed of these elements. It directly carried out the revolution.
The Xinhai revolution, on the other hand, although gaining the sympathy
of the masses, was actually carried out largely by disaffected local
gentry, military men and bureaucrats. Because its leadership did not
want to challenge capitalism (and imperialism) it had little social
impact, and whereas the likes of Cromwell and Robespierre were
characterised by enormous courage and determination to carry through a
thoroughgoing transformation, buoyed on by the masses, the leaders of
the Xinhai revolution, Sun Yat Sen and others, ultimately were
compromising and deferential both to the old regime and the imperial
powers. This was because they were led by those gentry and bureaucrats
who, as described above, had a vital interest in preserving the social
status quo. In order to force the abdication of Emperor Puyi, rather
than mobilise the masses throughout the country on a social programme to
overthrow the regime, Sun Yat Sen, now President of the new Republic in
the South, struck a deal with Yuan Shikai (who was appointed Prime
Minister of the Imperial Cabinet by the Emperor) that if he could
deliver the Emperor’s abdication, then Sun would resign and give the
Presidency to Yuan. And the terms of the abdication and establishment of
the Republic were as follows:

1. The Qing Emperor remains and will be treated as a foreign monarch by the Republic’s Government.
2. The Republic will allocate 4,000,000 Yuan each year for royal expenses.
3. The emperor will remain in the Forbidden City until he can be transferred to Yiheyuan (the Summer Palace).
4. Royal temple and tombs will be guarded and maintained.
5. The expenses of Guangxu’s tomb will be disbursed by the Republic.
6. Royal employees will remain in the Forbidden City with the exception of eunuchs.
7. Private property of the royal family will be protected by the Republic.
8. Royal forces will be incorporated into the army of the Republic.

In
other words, the revolution resolved itself into a change of personnel
at the top. Following this, a tussle for power broke out at the top of
the regime and Yuan Shikai attempted, unsuccessfully, to reinstate the
monarchy (with himself as Emperor!). The republican government was
completely split, ultimately because there was no real national
bourgeois class behind it, rather it was based on feudal warlords
lending it support, in whom power really lay. The degeneration of the
revolution into local warlordism, the inability to form a real national
government, and to solve burning social questions, in particular land
reform, is proof that the bourgeois, national revolution, whose two main
tasks are precisely the formation of a national government and market,
and land reform, could not be completed without breaking from the social
basis of capitalism in China at the time – the landlord/compradore
bourgeois class. The gentry who had supported the revolution insofar as
it stopped at the Emperor’s abdication had no interest in leading the
development and modernisation of Chinese society, and instead merely saw
an opportunity to strengthen their own local power in the absence of a
strong national government. Hence the splintering of China into local
fiefdoms after 1911.

It was the failure of this revolution that
led to a radicalisation within the Chinese youth and, crucially, the
nascent Chinese proletariat. There was a crisis of confidence in the
idea of Western parliamentary democracy as the way out. In 1919, many
still looked with hope to the Versailles peace negotiations after World
War I. They hoped that the redrawing of the world map in accordance with
Woodrow Wilson’s ideals of national self determination would liberate
China from the humiliating burden of imperial domination without the
need for internal strife and a violent struggle against the powerful
West. But their hopes were dashed when China was betrayed. Despite
having supported the Allies in the understanding that, in the event of
an Allied victory, the Shandong peninsula would be returned to Chinese
national sovereignty after having been controlled by Germany, the Treaty
of Versailles actually handed over control of Shandong to Japan. This
harsh lesson in imperialism sparked a mass movement of Chinese students
known as the May 4^th Movement.

Chen Duxiu

May 4th movement demonstrationAbove
all the other members of the intelligentsia it was Chen Duxiu who
understood the social question in the Chinese revolution. Whilst pushed
into the background by the more ‘practical’ and political likes of Sun
Yat Sen, Chen was founding and editing periodicals attempting to find a
way out of China’s crisis. Whereas others reacted to imperial dominance
either by advocating a return to traditional Confucian values as a means
to escape the corrupting West, or alternatively the emulation of the
Western political system, Chen sought a way to give the common,
downtrodden Chinese people a voice and a way out. The Anhui Common Speech Journal
which he founded was devoted to finding a way to transform Chinese
written language, and as a result Chinese culture and life as a whole.
Of course the vast mass of Chinese people were excluded from official
culture as they were illiterate, and the written language had an
extremely formal, rigid and conservative structure, was governed by
anachronistic rules, and bore little relation to vernacular Chinese as
spoken by ordinary people. This is the equivalent of a campaign in
medieval Europe for literature and church services to be given in the
vernacular languages of the common people rather than Latin. Indeed the
translation of things such as the Bible into English, German etc. from
Latin, and the invention of the printing press, did contribute
substantially to the Reformation and the general undermining of the
feudal class.

In essence, what Chen was doing was beginning,
amongst a layer of Chinese youth, a theoretical discussion on how to
liberate the masses of downtrodden Chinese. And despite temporarily
experimenting with numerous different ideas, Chen in his journals came
to the conclusion that it was not by a return to the past that China
would be liberated, but that a fundamental break with ossified feudal
traditions and relations was necessary. And his journals were extremely
popular, “no other Chinese intellectual had the prestige and authority
among China’s youth that Chen Duxiu had on the eve of the May 4^th Movement” (Lee Feigon, Chen Duxiu). It is estimated that his New Youth Magazine
may have had a circulation of 200,000. As Lenin said, without
revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement. Just as the
tumultuous theoretical debates within the Russian Social Democratic
Labour Party (out of which the Bolsheviks came) laid the solid
foundation for the successful taking of power in 1917, so Chen’s
journals and student discussion circles in the period 1904-1921 were
decisive in educating the young, founding cadres of the Chinese
Communist Party.

As has been said, the Chinese Revolution had to
be realised as part of a world socialist revolution, and not a national,
bourgeois revolution, because China’s feudal ruling class was already
tied by a thousand threads to the capitalist world market, preventing
the emergence of any independent, national bourgeoisie to lead the fight
against feudalism and imperialism. From the Marxist point of view, the
dragging of China into the world market, albeit in such a destructive
manner, is ultimately (and only ultimately) a progressive thing, because
it led to the development of China’s productive forces, the creation of
a Chinese proletariat, and made possible “a fundamental revolution in
the social state of Asia”, i.e. the establishment of socialism in Asia,
so that mankind could “fulfil its destiny” – the world revolution – as
Marx said.

It is quite fashionable nowadays to accuse Marxist
thought of really being just another edition of arrogant, Western
imperialist thinking coming out of the Enlightenment. It is said that
Marx had a patronising contempt for non-Europeans and thought it their
rightful destiny to always follow the West. But the truth is that Marx
defended the Chinese people against the outrageous crimes of the British
capitalist class, and in his articles in the New York Daily Tribune he
appealed not to ‘the West’ as one bloc, but to revolutionaries and
proletarians in the West to oppose their own imperialist governments and
solidarize with the Chinese people. Marx understood that the British
government was reactionary, and so the results of the colonisation of
China were only progressive insofar as they resulted in the downfall of
the Chinese ruling class and the Western ruling class – hence his
enthusiastic anticipation of a European revolution being sparked by one
in China, as quoted above. Furthermore, when reading Marxist literature
that describes as backward a nation such as China, this is not a racial
slander on the Chinese people but a correct characterisation of the
antiquated mode of production and the antiquated Chinese ruling class,
rather than the Chinese people. This is proven by the historical fact
that it was capitalist Western states, by force, which opened up
and undermined China, and not the other way around. Only now is China
competing on a more or less even capitalist basis with the West. That it
may soon overtake the West is also proof that this is not in any way a
‘racial’ question. It is not that Marxism considers imperialist
domination of one over the other right or good, or an expression of
national superiority, but simply that imperialism is an unavoidable
phase in history. That world history has borne witness to imperialism is
an undeniable fact. Long term historical development is the only test
for the validity of corresponding theories, not the ‘anti-orientalist’
professor’s study.

A New Class

By the early 20^th
Century something fundamentally new and of enormous historic
significance was happening in China – a modern, urban working class and
industry were developing. For imperialism has a dual expression –
certainly, as we have shown for China, it truncates and distorts the
development of colonised nations, upholds, strengthens and even
exaggerates antiquated social relations and means of production. But it
does so only so that it may incorporate the nation into the world
market, making it a part of the world division of labour involving the
most developed technology. The pauperisation of the rural population may
strengthen the old landlord class, but it also creates a large pool of
cheap labour, ideal for exploitation by the large quantities of capital
passing through the trading cities. So while, as described above, we see
an intensification of feudal exploitation and a decline in agricultural
productivity to pre-colonial levels, we also see in China, side by side
with this, an industry and working class developing in places like
Shanghai and Guangzhou based on the latest capitalist technology and
methods. This phenomenon Trotsky termed ‘combined and uneven
development,

“the accumulation of wealth by this class
[the compradore, landlord class] could not fail in the nature of things
to stimulate efforts to compete with the foreigners on their own
ground. Imperialism had destroyed the old economic base. It could hinder
but not entirely prevent the erection of a new one… The first
rice-cleaning mill was established in Shanghai in 1863. The Kiangnan
shipyard was established in 1865. Seven years later the China Merchants
Steam Navigation Company was organised to compete with the foreign
monopoly in coastal and river shipping… A modern coal mine began
operations at Kaiping in 1878, and in 1890 the first cotton-spinning and
–weaving mill was built at Shanghai and the first Ironworks at Wuchang.
Match factories and flour mills had followed by 1896. The
industrialisation of China had begun.” (Isaacs, op cit.)

Of
course these modern factories did not run themselves and required large
numbers of no doubt former peasants, thrown off the land, to do the
work. In particular it was the impulse given to Chinese industry by
World War I that developed the working class that was in the next few
years to lead the second Chinese revolution and join the newly formed
CCP. Whereas previously China had known a long history of peasant
revolts that could only result in the swapping of one ruling Dynasty for
another, (the Taiping rebellion of 1850-64 might have been different
were it not for the imperialist intervention) owing to the scattered and
variegated peasantry’s dependence on the leadership of an urban class,
this formation of a new urban class, just as exploited as the peasantry
but with the capacity for revolutionary political leadership, meant that
the potential now existed to do away with Dynastic, landlord and even
bourgeois rule once and for all.

The power that the working class
possesses, thanks to its socialised conditions of existence, shared
interests and vital economic role, was first really expressed in China
in the already mentioned May 4^th Movement in 1919. Started by
students, the anti-Japanese and Western protests received a powerful
and hitherto unknown fillip from the Shanghainese working class,

“At the end of 1916 there were already nearly 1m industrial workers in China and their number nearly doubled by 1922. An
army of nearly 200,000 Chinese labourers had been sent to Europe during
the war. Many of them learned to read and write and, even more
significantly, came in contact with European workers and the higher
European standard of living. They returned with new ideas about man’s
struggle to better his estate... These workers played a key role in the creation of new labour organisations,
in which they formed a solid and energetic nucleus… Their strikes in
Shanghai and other cities in 1919 more than anything else forced the
release of student demonstrators arrested in Peking and hastened the
resignation of the offending government officials.” (Ibid, our emphasis)

Despite
being only 7 years after the Xinhai revolution that ended the Qing
Dynasty, this decisive entry of the Chinese working class onto the stage
of history sparked off a new revolution and gave an enormous impulse to
revolutionary ideas. After all, the 1911 revolution had been an
indubitable failure. A crucial factor in the second revolution, a subtle
detail that was not understood by the Stalin/Zinoviev dominated
Comintern, was that for all their fame for having led the anti-Qing
revolution, the Guomindang were at the same time tarnished as a
revolutionary force precisely because of their compromising role in
1911. They led the pre-working class revolution, but by 1919 the working
class had changed everything, “the Kuomintang, heir to the party of the
1911 revolution, had fallen into sterile impotence.” (Ibid)

These
two characteristics – the new class division in Chinese society and its
link to Western revolutionary, socialist ideas, cried out for a
political expression able to complete what the Guomindang had failed to
do in 1911 – a revolution that would restore Chinese national
sovereignty and really unite and modernise China.

In Europe, the
merciless exposure of the illusions and limitations of the
‘Enlightenment’ ideals of the bourgeois revolution, in particular the
illusion of harmonious progress, by the cold realities of capitalism,
led to an explosion in pessimistic thought amongst the intelligentsia.
The likes of Nietzsche questioned whether progress really ever existed
and sought purely individual solutions to the soulless conditions of
capitalism. This has its modern equivalent in ‘post-modernism’ and those
who speak of the futility of collective struggle and the ‘end of
ideology’ (whilst happily dishing out their own eclectic ideology!). In
doing so they only prove their short sightedness, their contentment with
the status quo (despite the pessimistic talk of ‘no progress’) and
befuddlement in the face of the most superficial trends. Likewise the
failure of the first Chinese revolution in 1911, and the brutal, inhuman
reality of ‘modern’ and ‘advanced’ Western rule, caused many members of
the Chinese intelligentsia to descend into pessimism, “reacting against
what they saw as the hypocrisy of the West, many Chinese thinkers, like
many Westerners of the time, began to question the value of progress…
After a visit to Europe where he witnessed the devastation and
demoralisation that had occurred as a result of the war, Liang [Qichao]
returned to China in 1919 and denounced what he called “the dream of the
omnipotence of science.” Liang and his associates insisted that the
Chinese should respect their own civilisation by paying more attention
to certain traditional “spiritual values.”” (Feigon, op cit.) Liang must
have been left with his jaw on the floor when, immediately after making
these statements, the Chinese working class gave him a lesson in how to
restore Chinese dignity by borrowing ‘European’ methods of strike
action to defeat the pro-Western government in 1919! Similarly, our 21^st
Century intellectuals must be dumbfounded by the good old revolutionary
methods being rediscovered in the Arab world, Europe, and indeed China
today.

Chen Duxiu on the other hand stood head and shoulders above
other intellectuals of the time (apart from the other founders of the
CCP such as Li Dazhao). Thanks to his decades in running journals
dedicated to the revolutionary youth, always seeking a way out for
China, Chen and his young followers had drawn the conclusion that
traditional values were a part of the problem, (it was after all the
traditional Chinese state, based on Confucian ideology, that had sold
out to the ‘advanced’ West) and that new scientific ideas, ones not
tainted by exploitative capitalism, were needed to liberate China, “Chen
earlier had made the importance of science one of the focal points of
his attacks… he was not willing to allow Liang to disparage Western
scientific values. It was in this context that Chen, like many others
who were disappointed with Western bourgeois democracy, began to take a second look at the Bolshevik Revolution.” (Ibid, our emphasis).

The Russian Revolution and the Founding of the CCP

The
Russian Revolution had a profound effect on the consciousness of
Chinese youth and workers, as elsewhere. It meant that the most forward
thinking people would now look to Marxist ideas for a way forward, and
not those of Liberalism. Having captured state power to enable the
socialist reorganisation of society, the working class operates under a
fundamentally different foreign policy to the capitalists. Instead of
seeking to manoeuvre on the world stage to enhance their power at the
expense of others, as any powerful national capitalist class must do,
the working class must seek to extend their revolution across borders
and extend active solidarity to workers elsewhere whenever they can,
because that is the only way to consolidate and develop their own
revolution. This principle has been witnessed very recently in the Arab
Revolutions, and will also be crucial for the European working class in
the present crisis. These are the principles on which the Communist
International was founded, in the same year that the Chinese working
class entered the stage:

“Internationalism is the
subordination of the interests of the proletarian struggle in one nation
to the interests of that struggle on an international scale, and the
capability and readiness on the part of one nation which has gained a
victory over the bourgeoisie of making the greatest national sacrifices
for the overthrow of international capitalism.”

These
noble words were put into practice in the same year, 1919, when the
Soviet government enacted the Karakhan Manifesto, which relinquished the
territories, rights and privileges that the Tsarist government had won
from China in the past. In the context of the disgraceful handing of
Shandong from German hands to the Japanese behind China’s back in the
Versailles Treaty, along with all the other humiliations exacted from
the Chinese people by the West, this act of the revolutionary Russian
government must have had a massive impact on the Chinese at the time.
Quite possibly it was this above all else that convinced many, in
particular the followers of Chen Duxiu, to form the Chinese Communist
Party and apply for affiliation to the Communist International in 1921.

Li DazhaoBy 1919 Chen’s New Youth Magazine
had been advocating a form of Marxism and other socialist ideas for
some time. He wanted to form a political party using his base amongst
the youth to change China. In the disciplined and revolutionary
Bolshevik party that had led Russia’s revolution and was changing the
whole world, he found what he decided was a suitable blueprint. Li
Dazhao, the other outstanding founder of the CCP, had also embraced the
Russian Revolution and formed a Marxist study group amongst students. He
made contact with the Comintern and joined with Chen Duxiu and his
numerous followers to make preparations for founding the Chinese
Communist Party.

The Manifesto of the CCP was published in
November 1920, 72 years after the founding manifesto of the Communist
movement, and it openly declared right from the beginning the intention
to lead the working class to power in a socialist revolution, marking a
fundamental break with the hitherto dominant idea of the need to form a
Western style bourgeois, parliamentary democracy in China,

“The
first step toward realising our ideal society is to eradicate the
present bourgeois system. That can only be done by forcefully
overthrowing the capitalists’ state… The Communist Party will lead the
revolutionary proletariat to struggle against the capitalists and seize
political power from the hands of the capitalists, for it is that power
that maintains the capitalist state; and it will place that power in
the hands of the workers and peasants, just as the Russian Communists
did in 1917.”

It is worth noting that this manifesto,
and the coming documents of the First Congress in 1921, were drafted
with the explicit aid of the Comintern leadership in Russia. Peng Shuzhi
describes the process whereby the party was formed:

“The
first Communist group in China was established in Shanghai in May 1920,
with the help of Grigori Voitinski, the first representative sent to
China by the Communist International under the leadership of Lenin and
Trotsky… Two months after the establishment of the Shanghai Communist
Group, a Socialist Youth Corps (SYC) was founded. The SYC recruited
groups of young communists to be sent to study in Moscow. Beginning in
August 1920, the Communist Group published a weekly organ, The Labourer.
It was also responsible for spreading communist ideas among the workers
and developing modern trade unions. By September, the famous New Youth
monthly, edited by Chen Duxiu, became the organ of the Shanghai
Communist Group and publicly advocated Marxism, while reporting on the
true situation in Soviet Russia. Then, in November, the CG published a
clandestine monthly, The Communist, in which Bolshevik ideas and
revolutionary experience were introduced, along with writings about
communist movements in other countries. This journal also printed the
“Manifesto of the Communist International to the Workers of the World,”
written by Trotsky, and Lenin’s report to the Second Congress of the
Communist International… from about October 1920 other communist
groups were set up in places like Beijing, Wuhan, Changsha, Guangzhou
and Jinan.” (Peng Shuzhi, Introduction to Leon Trotsky on China).

Such
was the extraordinarily rapid development of the party that would soon
play such a decisive role in China. This speedy development was thanks
largely to Chen Duxiu’s and others’ decades of preparatory work (the end
result of the formation of the CCP they were of course unaware of at
the time) and the earth shattering events in Russia in 1917. Without the
formation of the Comintern there can be no doubt that the CCP would not
have been formed, certainly not in such a timely fashion and with such a
clear commitment to revolution. The founding programme of the CCP in
1921 is not only an immensely important historical document, but is
still relevant to the needs of China today:

“Our party
programme is as follows. (1) To overthrow the bourgeoisie with a
revolutionary army of the proletariat and to rebuild the state with the
toiling classes, until all class distinctions are abolished. (2) To
introduce a dictatorship of the proletariat in order to achieve the goal
of class struggle – an end to classes. (3) To destroy the system of
bourgeois private property and to expropriate machines, land, factories,
and the means of production, including semi-finished products. (4) To
ally with the Third International.”