From the Long March 1934 to Tiananmen 1989

From Workers’ Liberty 12-13

The Chinese Communist Party [after its defeats in 1926-7 thanks to Stalin’s policy, and then its conversion from a working-class socialist party, however misled, into a Stalinist political machine] more and more it withdrew from the towns, until by the mid-30s it had no influence or implantation in the towns worth speaking of.

Because of the weakness of the central state, the poor communications and transport, and the vast distances, the Maoist “warlords” could resist the central state’s drives against them. Chiang [and the GMD], who saw the Maoists for the threat they proved to be, hammered away at them for years without success until, in 1934, they were driven to make the year-long Long March from their base in Kiangsi north-west to Yenan. The Stalinists suffered tremendous casualties, but they survived and, in 1935, the itinerant Maoist state established itself in Yenan, close to the USSR border. Soon Chinese Stalinism took the essential shape it would have in 1949.

Rule

The party/army ruled over perhaps 80 million people, in backward conditions. They mobilised and organised the peasants. Until 1937 they organised peasant class struggle against the landlords; but the Maoist military machine retained the power to do what Mao would describe as manipulating the “contradictions among the people”. The Maoist crypto-state was organised on the model of Stalin’s USSR. They replicated Stalin’s purges of “Trotskyists”, and proudly called their own political police the “GPU”, after Stalin’s. But so far, this was no more than an enlarged piece of warlordism, with a durability given to it by the revolutionary aspirations of its core and the important distinction of treating the peasants as human beings, albeit human beings subordinated to the Maoist apparatus.

The Maoists were walled off in a very backward part of China, which had no cities and was poor in resources. Their prospects of conquering all China were not very good. The political situation had to change fundamentally before their prospects would change. Chiang Kai Shek’s Guomindang regime nominally controlled all of China except the “Red” areas by 1928. The GMD had begun as an ineffective and loose bourgeois-liberal electoral alliance. In 1922 it was reorganised on “Bolshevik” party lines with the help of Communist International (Cl) experts. It became a centralised, hierarchical party — and one with its own army and its own officers’ training academy, initially staffed by experts from the USSR. The GMD was associated with the Communist International, and Chiang Kai Shek was elected an honorary member of the presidium of Stalin’s Cl! It was a bourgeois party, but a party of a backward and very weak bourgeoisie — moreover, a bourgeoisie tied to the landlords even more closely than the Russian bourgeoisie had been by 1917 — and a bourgeois party organised as a militarised “combat organisation”. It was a bourgeois political movement capable of a high degree of independence from the bourgeoisie. This was very important for what happened to the GMD and to the Chinese bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie did not like the GMD, and nor did the imperialist powers which had control of large parts of cities like Shanghai and Beijing. Chiang’s treacherous massacre of his communist allies in 1927 changed all that. He made his peace with the imperialists and with the remaining unconquered warlords, and the GMD settled down to rule China.

What might at the beginning have been a movement whose core members were motivated by ideals higher than getting rich, degenerated rapidly into a corrupt bureaucratic apparatus for plundering China. Chiang Kai Shek himself was reputed to be comparatively honest, but his wife was a member of the rich, plundering, capitalist Soong family.

Despite the corruption, the GMD police state — as it soon became — was a formidable power. Then the Japanese intervened. They invaded Manchuria in 1931, and set up a puppet kingdom there called Manchukuo. In 1937 they invaded the rest of China, and quickly controlled over half the country, including the cities. This was the test for Chiang. He failed it spectacularly.

A national war of defence and liberation, to prevent the enslavement of China, was the burning necessity. It was endorsed and advocated by everyone from the Chinese bourgeoisie to the Stalinists and Trotskyists. Though the GMD regime was still a formidable force against the Chinese opposition, it was almost helpless before the Japanese onslaught, unable to mobilise and organise the people. Chiang seemed more concerned to prosecute his ten-year old war against the Chinese Stalinists than to defend China. Chiang was increasingly discredited.

Popular front

In 1935 the Stalinists had made the turn towards Popular Front politics made by the Communist Parties everywhere. Now they called for a national front against the Japanese. This became an increasingly popular demand as the Japanese cut through China. It found echoes within Chiang’s own army and party.

On the border with the Stalinist-held territories, the GMD officers made a private truce with the Stalinists. Chiang came to put a stop to it and was made prisoner by his own officers, who were now working closely with the Stalinists.

After consulting Stalin in Moscow, the Maoists decided to release Chiang on condition that he agreed to an anti-Japanese alliance with the CP’s “state”. He agreed, and the second “United Front” period, 1937-46, began. The Stalinists made huge concessions — on paper. They would accept Chiang as head of state, subordinate their army to his high command, dissolve the rural “soviets”, and cease being hostile to the landlords. But in fact they made few concessions in substance. They retained their own armies and their own control of those armies, whatever was said. In effect it was an alliance of states, with the Stalinist state keeping its de facto sovereignty. The initial result was to stiffen the resistance to the Japanese. But the corrupt GMD increasingly tried to get out of the firing line by way of local accommodations with the Japanese.

The CP increased in power, strength, and credibility with layers of the people of China, and the GMD was weakened, discredited, and rendered more decrepit as a ruling force. Even the bourgeoisie was alienated. The GMD now used the state, which it “owned”, to pillage and expropriate sections of the bourgeoisie, going far beyond the previous corruption. Backed by the USA, which had advisers in China, and indeed had soldiers there during World War 2 and until 1946, the bourgeoisie organised the “Democratic League” in an attempt to regain direct power. But the Democratic League was smashed up by the GMD police state, and its leaders driven into exile in Hong Kong. Most of the bourgeoisie had been eliminated as a political force. The decrepit GMD “party-state”, hated by intellectuals, bourgeois, peasants and workers alike, faced the vigorous Maoist “party-state”, whose standing was high with large sections of all those classes and which organised the peasants as its base everywhere it went.

The Maoists took much of the credit for the Chinese resistance to Japan, and they said (sincerely or otherwise) that they wanted to continue the alliance with Chiang after Japan surrendered to the US and Britain in 1945.

Chiang launched a new civil war in 1946, throwing million-strong well-armed armies against the numerically inferior forces of the Stalinists. But his regime was even more rotten now than it had been before 1937, when it had failed to destroy a much weaker Stalinist movement. Whole armies went over to the Stalinists, taking their equipment with them.

Symbolic victories

In 1948 the Stalinists occupied major cities, returning there in force for the first time in 20 years. In 1949 the GMD regime, led by Chiang, fled to Taiwan, where it [ruled for decades]. In October Mao declared the People’s Republic of China. Symbolically, Mao’s armies surrounded the cities and conquered them. Even Chiang Kai Shek had used working-class risings to capture cities like Shanghai in the 20s. Not Mao. The workers were strictly told to stay at work and not to strike or take any action against the employers. Symbolic too was what the Maoists did to the grave of the first secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, Chen Duxiu.

Chen had carried out Stalin’s disastrous policy in 1925-7 against his own judgment, observing Cl discipline, and then had been scapegoated for the catastrophe. He became a Trotskyist, was jailed by the GMD, and died in 1942. The triumphant Stalinists overturned and destroyed his gravestone. Chinese Stalinism came, so to speak, out of the mountains and the wildernesses fully formed and able to take control of society. It had its model of society — Stalin’s USSR. It camouflaged its rule by including remnants of the bourgeoisie in its governments. For seven or eight years it allowed the bourgeoisie to flourish as they had long ceased to flourish under Chiang, and then bought the capitalists out, giving them managerial jobs and 7% p.a. on their capital. The Chinese state was still paying this 7% until 1969, and resumed paying in the 1980s.

For 20 years, through many tortuous manoeuvres and zig-zags, the Maoist leaders had been fighting tenaciously to overthrow the old order. (The pseudo-Trotskyist argument that the Maoists were forced to take power by “the pressure of the masses” is utterly baseless). The Maoists had also, in that time, been shaping, augmenting, steeling and perfecting the instrument of rule of a new class of state bureaucrats. The resulting socio-economic formation was characterised — in many ways like the ancient Chinese empire — by the preponderance of the gigantic state machine and its political control over the economy.

Through that military-political control over the economy, it was able over decades to engage in wild experiments in “social engineering”, completely outside the control of the masses who bore the cost of it in their lives and, for millions of them, in the loss of their lives. But, though the elite could crudely control the people and the economy, they could not at will escape China’s backwardness and paucity of natural resources.

Their attempts to do so by seeking economic miracles only added to the difficulties. The latest zig-zag, towards market economics, has provoked new convulsions, which are far from over. On 6 July 1989 there was a general strike in Beijing. There have been strikes in other cities.

Workers have organised independent trade unions — and suffered terrible repression. The Stalinist troops surrounded Beijing, as in 1949. Then the cities were passive or welcoming. Now the cities were vibrant and alive, rejecting the Stalinist state power. As if by a miracle, the Chinese nation has come back to autonomous life. The iron tombstone of the Stalinist regime has lost its power to hold it in stillness. The regime had no authority in Beijing, nor in many other cities. Probably the regime still retains support in the countryside. The farmers have had a serious degree of self-determination restored to them in the last ten years. They have had the benefits of a radical land reform carried out by the Deng regime, and many of them have known far greater prosperity than in a generation. Even so, the legitimacy of the regime has been seriously shaken with large sections of the Chinese people. They will not believe the regime’s lies about what happened.

Students

A whole generation of students have been made into bitter critics and enemies of the regime. They will be a revolutionary leaven throughout Chinese society, despite the Stalinist reign of terror. The students have organised independent student unions. Some workers organised independent trade unions; the leaders of that movement were among the first to be arrested, even before the massacre in Tienanmen Square.

Whereas Russian Stalinism rose on the grave of the October 1917 workers’ revolution, the Chinese Stalinists led a revolution. As a result of that the Maoist regime had great credit with the people, despite its bungling and its repression. It was a powerful nationalist force which had restored self-determination to the Chinese people and unified China. It was a regime whose members were not individually corrupt, though the ruling elite was a privileged class. All that credit has been exhausted over the last decade. Individual corruption has eaten into the party and the state machine. A process comparable to the degeneration and corruption which rotted the GMD has progressed very far in the Chinese Stalinist polity over the last decade. The old Jacobin egalitarian ethos which Maoism provided for the masses (though the elite did very well for themselves behind closed doors) has given way to a new ethos of self-enrichment. Only a few have got rich. The resulting damage to the standing of the ruling party has been massive.

The long historical episode of Chinese Stalinism in power as the leader of a great nation-reshaping revolution is over. The drive of the people to act for themselves and to slough off the carapace of the all-powerful state has been demonstrated mightily. The Chinese workers have come from being a crushed and atomised mass, ground under the state, to be a mighty force.

The natural weapon of the workers in the Stalinist states is the mass strike. It was the weapon in East Germany in 1953, in Poland and Hungary in 1956, and Poland in 1980. It made its appearance in China in May and June 1989. Nothing will ever be the same again — however long the reign of terror lasts at its present intensity. Their experience of struggle will give great encouragement to the Chinese masses in the battles they face against the effects of the economic chaos created by the combination of bureaucratic tyranny and market economics. Whatever the bureaucracy does, whichever way it turns, the economic chaos will be immense. If the free market is allowed to go as it is going, many tens of millions of workers will become unemployed. But to restore centralisation will be difficult.

• Abridged from an article by Jack Cleary in Workers’ Liberty 12-13, August 1989, which also contains much other background. See also How Mao Conquered China, Workers’ Liberty 3/24.

Since 1989 the CCP leaders have been able to keep control both by repression and by claiming credit for the quick economic growth coming from huge investments of foreign capital, huge infrastructure-building projects, and integration into the capitalist world market.

That economic growth has allowed them to contain the working class and students, by conceding rapid wage rises to many workers. But strikes have increased, and even some political protests, culminating in the large revolts against the ultra-lockdown policy, which forced the CCP to concede.