RedStruggle
2nd February 2010, 17:00
To what extent was the first united front made necessary by the social and political conditions of 1920s China?
During the period 1922-27, the CPC found itself subject to a united front policy which was centered around the party being made to constitute itself as a “bloc within”, whereby its members joined the KMT and supported that organization in its work on an individual basis whilst maintaining membership of the CPC. This policy had its theoretical origins in the Second Congress of the Comintern in 1920 where it was decided that it was the duty of Communists in oppressed nations to “assist the bourgeois-democratic liberation movement” on the grounds that the agrarian and national questions in these countries had not yet been solved and that the victory of an independence movement would enhance the prospects for revolution in the most advanced capitalist countries. Although this policy encountered severe opposition from Asian delegates, most notably M.N. Roy, who attacked Lenin's arguments by pointing out that the phrase “bourgeois-democratic” was unclear and that the adoption of this position would lead to Communists giving support to every reformist movement in oppressed nations, the essence of the policy was passed in a unanimous vote with only three abstentions, after Lenin had replaced “bourgeois-democratic” with “national-revolutionary” in order to make it clear that a movement of the type that Communists were obliged to support would not interfere with their work amongst the peasantry. Initially, the Comintern found that the CPC was not willing to accept this policy. It had been argued by the majority at the First Congress of the CPC in 1921 firstly that the party should adopt a “closed-door policy” towards government institutions, by which it was meant that party members would not be allowed to take up positions as government officials or as members of provincial assemblies and other such bodies, and, more importantly, that Sun Yat-sen deserved to be opposed because he was a “demagogue”, with some delegates such as the representative from Canton arguing that Sun actually deserved more opposition than the warlords on the grounds that he had “confused with the masses with his demagogy”. The Second Congress of the party in July 1922 represented a more moderate stance as the 12 representatives speaking on behalf of the by-then 123 party members decided that they would be willing “to act jointly with” the KMT through a “united front from without”, whilst also describing the peasants as “the most important factors in our revolutionary movement”. Nonetheless, the party still made clear that any alliance it did enter into with the KMT would be “temporary” and that the proletariat would still “strive for their own class independently”. It also referred to “all the nation's revolutionary parties” and not just the KMT as candidates for a broad alliance. Only at a special plenum of the Central Committee in August of the same year was the “bloc within” policy finally imposed due to the Comintern representative, Maring, citing the authority of his organization. Such was the first united front born. This essay is concerned with whether the prevailing rational for this policy – that “the independent workers' movement in the country is still weak”, as was decided by the ECCI at the Fourth Congress of the Comintern in late 1922 – accurately reflected the political condition of the working class and the CPC when the policy was formulated. It is concerned, in essence, with whether an urban revolution along the same lines as 1917 was a viable possibility in China, and it will be argued that such a possibility did exist, and that the rationale for the united front does not stand.
The condition of Marxism just prior to the foundation of the CPC in 1921 and the condition of the party in that year does not suggest any immediate possibility of urban revolution. Dirlik has argued against the accepted view that the interest of Chinese intellectuals in Marxism was prompted by the Russian Revolution and that Marxist ideas were able to spread rapidly in the aftermath of the May Fourth Movement by pointing out that whilst there was interest in socialism during this heady period, not least as a manifestation of the growing conflict between capital and labour, it was initially to more humanist-orientated forms of socialism that intellectuals turned, most notably anarchism, and a form of guild socialism, as these ideologies offered the prospect of a peaceful end to social conflict, whereas Marxism, especially in its Leninist form, sought to bring about change through class struggle. In this context, Dirlik holds that the arrival of the Comintern representative Voitinsky in March of 1920 was central to the emergence of Marxism as the dominant ideological force and the eventual founding of the CPC due to his role in establishing study societies during the course of 1920, which eventually transformed themselves into Communist cells and provided the basis for the party. What is remarkable about these societies, however, is their ideological incoherence, as not only was a commitment to or knowledge of Marxism not initially a condition for membership, in many instances these societies were dominated by anarchists, including the society in Guangzhou, which consisted entirely of followers of that ideology, and until late 1920 anarchists were also responsible for publishing the periodicals of these societies, such that, when Marxist ideas were promoted, they assumed a highly eclectic form, and appeared alongside other ideas and arguments. The transformation of these societies did not end the problem of ideology, as Dirlik also reports that, at the First Congress, the participating intellectuals “knew little about Marxism”, to the extent that, of the forty-eight identifiable Communists who were represented by twelve delegates, only twenty-one were committed Communists. It appears that individuals could be regarded as theoreticians by their peers when they had only a rudimentary grasp of Marxism, such that Liu Renjing, a participant at the founding congress, was given the title of “little Marx” whilst studying at Beida and attending the Society for the Study of Marxist Theory simply because he gave a basic lecture on Marxism during the course of 1921, just prior to the creation of the party, with the content being taken entirely from a couple of secondary works.
In addition to this lack of ideological coherence and the early party members' superficial grasp of Marxism, Yeh has also pointed out that the foundation of the party and its subsequent Bolshevization led to many of the earliest members of the study societies from which the party had emerged as well as the party itself leaving due to their opposition to the party's goals and its centralized modes of organization, so that, by the time it had matured, the initial base of membership was largely absent, as exemplified by the case of Shi ****ong, as well as Li Hanjun. It has been argued by van de Ven, also on the subject of organization, that the organizational structures of the CPC for the first few years of its existence were very weak and that this hindered the ability of the organization to work effectively amongst the working class, being both a cause and a consequence of its early members being drawn almost entirely from the ranks of the intelligentsia, as well as the role of personal networks and friendship groups, which made members averse to accepting the authority of a central body outside of their immediate geographical or personal context. The resistance amongst the party membership to any established hierarchy is evident from the party constitutions adopted at the Second and Third Congresses in July 1922 and June 1923, as these constitutions provided only for an annual Congress and did not outline bureaucratic pyramids or chains of authority that would have allowed the central authorities in Shanghai to give orders to local party members and organizations, with the second constitution also strengthening the power of regional organizations by stipulating that a national Congress would have to be convened if only a third of the regions requested it. At the same time, there were also intense conflicts when the centre did seek to impose its authority, and the author attributes this to the fact that many members retained ties to the study-society modes of operation from which the party had emerged and that they also regarded Chen Duxiu as a patron and the CPC as a convenient framework within which they could develop their own activities and ideas. An example of these centre-regional disputes is the case of the Guangdong branch's orientation towards the southern warlord Chen Jiongming in 1922, as, having ordered the Communists in this region to disassociate themselves from the warlord, the party centre found that they had failed to do so and that the leading publication of the local party, 'Pearl River Review', was in fact being financed by him, with the same report also noting that the members in the province were planning to withdraw from the national party and constitute themselves as the Communist Party of Guangdong. This dispute rapidly resulted in the expulsion of the leading member Chen Gongbo and the deterioration of intra-party relations between Guangdong and the centre until the latter moved to the province in 1923 in preparation for the Third Congress. Thus, it is difficult to speak of a unified party during this initial period and only from 1923 onwards did democratic centralism begin to be implemented, enabling the party to control its members.
These approaches are radically different from one another insofar as van de Ven rejects Dirlik's assumption that the party's foundation meant the sudden acceptance of Leninist organizational methods, as these methods came to be accepted only over time, and Yeh also attacks the notion of a continuous membership, but what they all have in common is that they reveal a party that was not in any position to act as the organized vanguard of the working class in the early 1920s, due to ideological and organizational weaknesses, and in this respect it is easy to sympathize with the Comintern and accept that the “bloc within” strategy was justified. It is all the more surprising, then, that in spite of its extreme weakness during the first years of the decade, the CPC was able to play a more prominent role in major class struggles, and that these struggles revealed a highly militant and disciplined working class. The foremost of these struggles, in light of the limited participation of the CPC in the Hong Kong seaman strike in early 1922, was the Peking-Hankou railroad strike. This struggle was made possible by an agreement that the CPC had entered into with the local warlord, Wu Peifu, whereby CPC members were given the responsibility of rooting out supporters of the recently-defeated Communications Clique, whilst also being permitted to engage with the railroad workers, the result being that, during the spring of 1922, under the leadership of Zhang Guotao, the party established sixteen separate unions at various locations alone the line which were then brought together at a meeting in August, which produced a preparatory committee capable of organizing actions involving the whole of the workforce. The consequence of these organizing efforts and the immediate struggles which emerged from them was the union being ordered to disband during the first month of 1923, and when, in early February, an all-out strike was declared, with the workers demanding the sacking of the director of the railroad, one day off a week and a week's holiday each year with pay, and recognition of their union, their organization was crushed by Wu's troops, and several dozen workers were killed, with more than a thousand losing their jobs. This struggle is relevant for the essay because it reveals that the CPC was capable of taking advantage of its opportunities, and that, in spite of there having only been 152 strikes in the two decades before 1919, it was easy for a large segment of the working class to become involved in struggle. What it also shows, however, is that, as long as its zones of operation remained under warlord control, the CPC remained vulnerable to repression, and it is for this reason that the party's membership remained below 1,000 at the end of 1924. It is also significant that when worker struggles did emerge, a central role was played by the “bang” and other provincial associations which limited interaction between workers of different geographical origins and could, according to Perry, generate violent conflicts between workers as well as support class conflicts. Harrison also notes the extent to which the working class was influenced by the symbols and values of republicanism and participated in republican symbology by, for example, hanging national flags, and involving themselves in political festivals, and calls into question whether the working class had become radicalized as a result of its struggles and exposure to the CPC.
The evidence above largely contradicts the thesis of this essay, that an urban revolution was possible, because it does not appear that the working class was revolutionary or that the CPC was an important pole of attraction. The experience which give us reason to doubt the united front is the May 30th Movement of 1925, and it is also this movement which reveals the class structure of Chinese society in the 1920s, and the extent to which struggles could rapidly evolve and threaten the class interests of the bourgeoisie. This movement, having its origins in the murder of a Chinese worker by a Japanese foreman, and immediately giving rise to a far-reaching strike wave and the creation of the Shanghai General Union, which encouraged unionization drives and kept watch over scabbing attempts, is centrally relevant for the essay not only because of the immediate increase in industrial unrest in foreign-owned factories, primarily in Shanghai, but also because the declaration of a strike and boycott of all foreign goods in Hong Kong in late June after a serious of further murders led to more than 100,000 workers in that city taking the unprecedented move of traveling to the vicinity of Canton, bringing all foreign and commercial activity to a stop, and, for the first time in China's history as a capitalist society, creating an organ of democratic working-class rule which can justifiably be described as a Soviet, as acknowledged by Isaacs. The strikers took control of gambling and opium dens and transformed them into canteens and dormitories, and an army of 2000 pickets was raised from amongst the strikers in order to put a barrier around Hong Kong and Xiamen, with all of the strikers organizing themselves into a committee of 800 delegates, with one representative for every fifty strikers, all of them subject to instant recall, who then in turn nominated thirteen men to function as an executive committee. This committee organized a hospital and seventeen schools for men and women workers and for their children were established and maintained, with special committees also handing funds and contributions, the auctioning of confiscated goods, and the keeping of records, whilst also publishing a weekly newspaper, 'The Labour Way'. Strikers were organized to undertake voluntary work, which included building a road from Canton to Whampoa, and even took control of twelve river boats to apprehend smugglers. A strikers’ court was set up which tried offenders against the boycott or other disturbers of public order. The task of covering all lines of communication along the Guangdong coast and at all ports was carried out with the co-operation of the peasant associations, due to strikers having spread to the villages to raise support for the boycott and advance the movement for agrarian reform, with peasant pickets patrolling the coast at Shantou, Haifeng, Pingshang, and other points, to make the blockade complete. The creation of this body, which, in addition to being called a Soviet, also carried the designation “Government Number Two”, can be regarded as a pivotal moment in modern Chinese history because it represented the first time that the working class had stepped forward as an autonomous force, not only challenging imperialism through mass mobilization, but also the privileges of Chinese capitalists, including their political power. The extent to which the Soviet did damage the interests of the imperialist powers is evident from the comments of an official from the British Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong, who, apart from lamenting that “the [Country] Club is empty, all servants gone”, also captured the economic impact of the boycott by pointing out that during the months before the crisis between 160 and 240 boats came through the harbour of Canton each month, but that the figures had fallen to less than 30 whilst the strike was taking place.
In truth, and owing to the nationalist character of the movement, the Soviet also involved workers lending support to the the nationalists at Whampoa. For example, workers were employed as carriers in the KMT armies whilst the committee remained in existence. This does not diminish the importance of the body, or the thesis of this essay, however, because the radical phase of the May 30th Movement also revealed that anti-imperialist struggles could not be limited to a small set of objectives, and that, when faced with an energetic movement from below, China's capitalists and the the KMT would side with imperialism. The movement, according to Waldron, was initially solely nationalist in its orientation such that the General Chamber of Commerce collected funds for the strikers in foreign-owned factories (motivated partly by the fact that these factories being out of action allowed Chinese enterprises to take control of a larger share of the market, if only for a limited period of time) and even northern warlords sought to lend support in order to avoid being seen as on the side of imperialism. The General Chamber of Commerce did not, however, join the Workers', Merchants; and Students' Federation that was set up on June 6th and when it agreed to present the Federation's demands to the Peking government in the middle of June it refused to include those demands (out of a total of seventeen) which related to the working class as well as those which posed serious challenges to imperialism, including the right to strike, Chinese control over the police of the International Settlement, and the abolition of extraterritoriality. The bourgeoisie moved closer to imperialism and the merchants withdrew from the strike when, after dialogue between these groups and foreign capitalists, the latter agreed to enhance the political strength of the former by admitting wealthy Chinese to the Municipal Council and re-opening negotiations on restoring tariff control. Isaacs also reports that at this time there was increasing interaction between workers employed in foreign-owned and indigenous enterprises and that when the latter realized that their conditions were often worse than those of their fellow workers in spite of the supposed nationalism of their employers they too began to take strike action with the aim of extracting economic concessions and union rights from their employers, and that this, combined with the decision to shut off electricity in Chinese factories on July 6th, led the bourgeoisie to openly oppose the movement by cutting off the provision of funds, and then, as the movement increasingly assumed the character of a class struggle, send in gangsters and their hired thugs to break up the General Labour Union, in cooperation with the Fengtien military clique. The same tendency for the ruling class to side with imperialism can be observed in the changing relationship between the CPC and the KMT, despite the latter being rooted primarily in the gentry, as the militant stance of the working class during the May 30th Movement as well as the expansion of the CPC, whose membership had increased to 10,000 by the end of 1925, with most of these recruits being drawn directly from the ranks of the working class, were important factors behind Chiang's March 20 coup, which resulted in the KMT's Russian advisers being placed under house arrest, the CPC being made to provide a complete list of its members to the KMT, and no longer being allowed to serve as heads of bureaus at the KMT headquarters, or send directives to its members without having first consulted with the KMT, with the CPC subsequently being prohibited from holding more than one third of the seats on executive committees at central, municipal, and district levels.
The experience of the May 30th Movement and its aftermath indicates that the CPC could rapidly transform itself into a mass organization, and that the political condition of the working class was such that Soviet power could be established at a local level, but at the same time it also demonstrated that the “bloc within” strategy represented a limitation on the party's ability to pursue state power, and that mass struggles could easily endanger the alliance, making the united front not only unnecessary, especially from 1925 onwards, but also impossible in the long-term. A further way in which the party found its political independence limited but over a longer period of time was in the area of rural policy. The Third International had explicitly stated in May 1923 that the Communists should stress the peasant movement and carry out radical land slogans whilst also demanding priority for the untied front with the KMT, which was seen as the leader of a radical land reform movement against the old gentry, but the reality was that many of its officers came from landed families and the KMT was alarmed at the Comintern's demands for land confiscation without compensation. As a result of these conflicts and the importance that was allocated to the united front above all other concerns the Comintern accepted the decision at the Fourth Congress in early 1925 that “peasants should not be allowed to decide recklessly on the reduce-rent movement” as well as the subsequent decision in July 1926 of the Central Committee plenum that the “peasant movement has developed the disease of left deviation everywhere”. In practice, the CPC's position on the agrarian question (which was also motivated partly by Chen Duxiu's opposition to anything but an urban revolution in which the peasants would be relegated to a supporting role) meant asking only for a limiting of land rent to fifty percent of the crop as against normal rents in southern China which generally reached around 2/3s of the crop or more. Bianco reports that the KMT being rooted in the gentry was a prominent feature of the 1930s Nanjing government as well and also served to limit the government's ability to carry out reform, as, despite having been supported by a wave of revolutionary fervor during the period 1926-7, the victory of the KMT owed a great deal to its cooperation with warlords, some of whom were taken into the party at the top level, and, having taken power, the KMT found that large landowners flocked to it just as they had earlier served as the pillars of Confucian orthodoxy, so that ten years after the events of 1926 the members of the KMT in any given rural locality were almost invariably the village head and government officials, which is to say they were members of the privileged landlord class. It is significant then that in spite of being forced to adopt a conservative policy the CPC still played a key role in the struggles of the Chinese countryside in the 1920s, conducted primarily through the peasant associations, which, drawing their inspiration from the famous example set by Peng Pai in Guangdong in 1920-21, rapidly grew in membership, so that in Hunan membership rose from around a third of a million in mid-1926 to 2 million by the end of the year and 4.5 million in forty-one counties just after the events of April 1927, by which point the peasant associations were able to claim more than nine million members in sixteen provinces, with the associations being especially militant and important in Guangdong and Hunan. These associations had as their role a number of functions, such as protecting their members against the exactions of landlords and tax collectors, and calling for rent reductions, and although problems were reported, such as activists having to appeal to traditional notions of justice in order to convince the peasants that their rents were unfair, peasants supporting the KMT when that party offered military support against the militias and hired thugs of the landlords, and associations not being able to break up more traditional forms of association such as the triads and lineage groups, the fact that these associations did grow shows that the peasantry was not servile, and that, if the CPC had adopted a more radical stance that more fully reflected the injustices of the Chinese countryside, the peasantry could have been mobilized alongside the working class against capitalism.
In conclusion, this essay has sought to understand the changes experienced by the CPC in the 1920s and to investigate whether at any point it was possible for the party to break free from the united front with the KMT and carry out an urban revolution, and it has been shown that the CPC was ultimately a party that was forged in the heat of class struggle, as whilst, in its early years, the CPC was centered around intellectuals, with numerous ideological and organizational flaws, its immersion in mass movements and struggles such as May 30th turned it into a party whose members were drawn from the ranks of the working class and numbered in excess of 50,000 prior to the fatal events of April 1927. The experience of May 30th showed that workers could, when mobilized, develop their own institutions of political power, and that, when confronted with widespread political participation, elites would have no choice but to take the side of imperialism. The inability of a militant working class and a party with its roots in rural and industrial elites to exist alongside each other and pursue their goals without coming into conflict with one another were revealed fully through the tragic events of 1927, and although the CPC was able to survive, it did so at a terrible cost, due to its organic link with the working class being effectively severed. In this sense 1927 brought to an end a revolutionary situation not only in China during the period 1925-27 but also on an international scale, which had begun with the revolution of 1917, and which, when brought to a close, was followed by the darkness of the 1930s.
Bibliography:
Bianco, 'Origins of the Chinese Revolution' (1971)
Chesneaux, 'The Chinese Labour Movement 1919-1927' (1980)
De Ven, 'From Friend to Comrade' (1992)
Dirlik, 'The Origins of Chinese Communism' (1989)
Galbiati 'Peng Pai and the Hai-Lu-Feng Soviet' (1985)
Harrison, 'Long March to Power' (1973)
Harrison, 'The Making of the Republican Citizen' (2000)
Isaacs, 'The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution' (1938)
Perry, 'Shanghai on Strike' (1993)
Waldron, 'From War to Nationalism: China’s Turning Point, 1924–1925' (1995)
Whiting, 'Soviet Policies in China 1917-1924' (1954)
Yeh, 'Provincial Passages: Culture, Space, and the Origins of Chinese Communism, 1919-1927' (1996)
During the period 1922-27, the CPC found itself subject to a united front policy which was centered around the party being made to constitute itself as a “bloc within”, whereby its members joined the KMT and supported that organization in its work on an individual basis whilst maintaining membership of the CPC. This policy had its theoretical origins in the Second Congress of the Comintern in 1920 where it was decided that it was the duty of Communists in oppressed nations to “assist the bourgeois-democratic liberation movement” on the grounds that the agrarian and national questions in these countries had not yet been solved and that the victory of an independence movement would enhance the prospects for revolution in the most advanced capitalist countries. Although this policy encountered severe opposition from Asian delegates, most notably M.N. Roy, who attacked Lenin's arguments by pointing out that the phrase “bourgeois-democratic” was unclear and that the adoption of this position would lead to Communists giving support to every reformist movement in oppressed nations, the essence of the policy was passed in a unanimous vote with only three abstentions, after Lenin had replaced “bourgeois-democratic” with “national-revolutionary” in order to make it clear that a movement of the type that Communists were obliged to support would not interfere with their work amongst the peasantry. Initially, the Comintern found that the CPC was not willing to accept this policy. It had been argued by the majority at the First Congress of the CPC in 1921 firstly that the party should adopt a “closed-door policy” towards government institutions, by which it was meant that party members would not be allowed to take up positions as government officials or as members of provincial assemblies and other such bodies, and, more importantly, that Sun Yat-sen deserved to be opposed because he was a “demagogue”, with some delegates such as the representative from Canton arguing that Sun actually deserved more opposition than the warlords on the grounds that he had “confused with the masses with his demagogy”. The Second Congress of the party in July 1922 represented a more moderate stance as the 12 representatives speaking on behalf of the by-then 123 party members decided that they would be willing “to act jointly with” the KMT through a “united front from without”, whilst also describing the peasants as “the most important factors in our revolutionary movement”. Nonetheless, the party still made clear that any alliance it did enter into with the KMT would be “temporary” and that the proletariat would still “strive for their own class independently”. It also referred to “all the nation's revolutionary parties” and not just the KMT as candidates for a broad alliance. Only at a special plenum of the Central Committee in August of the same year was the “bloc within” policy finally imposed due to the Comintern representative, Maring, citing the authority of his organization. Such was the first united front born. This essay is concerned with whether the prevailing rational for this policy – that “the independent workers' movement in the country is still weak”, as was decided by the ECCI at the Fourth Congress of the Comintern in late 1922 – accurately reflected the political condition of the working class and the CPC when the policy was formulated. It is concerned, in essence, with whether an urban revolution along the same lines as 1917 was a viable possibility in China, and it will be argued that such a possibility did exist, and that the rationale for the united front does not stand.
The condition of Marxism just prior to the foundation of the CPC in 1921 and the condition of the party in that year does not suggest any immediate possibility of urban revolution. Dirlik has argued against the accepted view that the interest of Chinese intellectuals in Marxism was prompted by the Russian Revolution and that Marxist ideas were able to spread rapidly in the aftermath of the May Fourth Movement by pointing out that whilst there was interest in socialism during this heady period, not least as a manifestation of the growing conflict between capital and labour, it was initially to more humanist-orientated forms of socialism that intellectuals turned, most notably anarchism, and a form of guild socialism, as these ideologies offered the prospect of a peaceful end to social conflict, whereas Marxism, especially in its Leninist form, sought to bring about change through class struggle. In this context, Dirlik holds that the arrival of the Comintern representative Voitinsky in March of 1920 was central to the emergence of Marxism as the dominant ideological force and the eventual founding of the CPC due to his role in establishing study societies during the course of 1920, which eventually transformed themselves into Communist cells and provided the basis for the party. What is remarkable about these societies, however, is their ideological incoherence, as not only was a commitment to or knowledge of Marxism not initially a condition for membership, in many instances these societies were dominated by anarchists, including the society in Guangzhou, which consisted entirely of followers of that ideology, and until late 1920 anarchists were also responsible for publishing the periodicals of these societies, such that, when Marxist ideas were promoted, they assumed a highly eclectic form, and appeared alongside other ideas and arguments. The transformation of these societies did not end the problem of ideology, as Dirlik also reports that, at the First Congress, the participating intellectuals “knew little about Marxism”, to the extent that, of the forty-eight identifiable Communists who were represented by twelve delegates, only twenty-one were committed Communists. It appears that individuals could be regarded as theoreticians by their peers when they had only a rudimentary grasp of Marxism, such that Liu Renjing, a participant at the founding congress, was given the title of “little Marx” whilst studying at Beida and attending the Society for the Study of Marxist Theory simply because he gave a basic lecture on Marxism during the course of 1921, just prior to the creation of the party, with the content being taken entirely from a couple of secondary works.
In addition to this lack of ideological coherence and the early party members' superficial grasp of Marxism, Yeh has also pointed out that the foundation of the party and its subsequent Bolshevization led to many of the earliest members of the study societies from which the party had emerged as well as the party itself leaving due to their opposition to the party's goals and its centralized modes of organization, so that, by the time it had matured, the initial base of membership was largely absent, as exemplified by the case of Shi ****ong, as well as Li Hanjun. It has been argued by van de Ven, also on the subject of organization, that the organizational structures of the CPC for the first few years of its existence were very weak and that this hindered the ability of the organization to work effectively amongst the working class, being both a cause and a consequence of its early members being drawn almost entirely from the ranks of the intelligentsia, as well as the role of personal networks and friendship groups, which made members averse to accepting the authority of a central body outside of their immediate geographical or personal context. The resistance amongst the party membership to any established hierarchy is evident from the party constitutions adopted at the Second and Third Congresses in July 1922 and June 1923, as these constitutions provided only for an annual Congress and did not outline bureaucratic pyramids or chains of authority that would have allowed the central authorities in Shanghai to give orders to local party members and organizations, with the second constitution also strengthening the power of regional organizations by stipulating that a national Congress would have to be convened if only a third of the regions requested it. At the same time, there were also intense conflicts when the centre did seek to impose its authority, and the author attributes this to the fact that many members retained ties to the study-society modes of operation from which the party had emerged and that they also regarded Chen Duxiu as a patron and the CPC as a convenient framework within which they could develop their own activities and ideas. An example of these centre-regional disputes is the case of the Guangdong branch's orientation towards the southern warlord Chen Jiongming in 1922, as, having ordered the Communists in this region to disassociate themselves from the warlord, the party centre found that they had failed to do so and that the leading publication of the local party, 'Pearl River Review', was in fact being financed by him, with the same report also noting that the members in the province were planning to withdraw from the national party and constitute themselves as the Communist Party of Guangdong. This dispute rapidly resulted in the expulsion of the leading member Chen Gongbo and the deterioration of intra-party relations between Guangdong and the centre until the latter moved to the province in 1923 in preparation for the Third Congress. Thus, it is difficult to speak of a unified party during this initial period and only from 1923 onwards did democratic centralism begin to be implemented, enabling the party to control its members.
These approaches are radically different from one another insofar as van de Ven rejects Dirlik's assumption that the party's foundation meant the sudden acceptance of Leninist organizational methods, as these methods came to be accepted only over time, and Yeh also attacks the notion of a continuous membership, but what they all have in common is that they reveal a party that was not in any position to act as the organized vanguard of the working class in the early 1920s, due to ideological and organizational weaknesses, and in this respect it is easy to sympathize with the Comintern and accept that the “bloc within” strategy was justified. It is all the more surprising, then, that in spite of its extreme weakness during the first years of the decade, the CPC was able to play a more prominent role in major class struggles, and that these struggles revealed a highly militant and disciplined working class. The foremost of these struggles, in light of the limited participation of the CPC in the Hong Kong seaman strike in early 1922, was the Peking-Hankou railroad strike. This struggle was made possible by an agreement that the CPC had entered into with the local warlord, Wu Peifu, whereby CPC members were given the responsibility of rooting out supporters of the recently-defeated Communications Clique, whilst also being permitted to engage with the railroad workers, the result being that, during the spring of 1922, under the leadership of Zhang Guotao, the party established sixteen separate unions at various locations alone the line which were then brought together at a meeting in August, which produced a preparatory committee capable of organizing actions involving the whole of the workforce. The consequence of these organizing efforts and the immediate struggles which emerged from them was the union being ordered to disband during the first month of 1923, and when, in early February, an all-out strike was declared, with the workers demanding the sacking of the director of the railroad, one day off a week and a week's holiday each year with pay, and recognition of their union, their organization was crushed by Wu's troops, and several dozen workers were killed, with more than a thousand losing their jobs. This struggle is relevant for the essay because it reveals that the CPC was capable of taking advantage of its opportunities, and that, in spite of there having only been 152 strikes in the two decades before 1919, it was easy for a large segment of the working class to become involved in struggle. What it also shows, however, is that, as long as its zones of operation remained under warlord control, the CPC remained vulnerable to repression, and it is for this reason that the party's membership remained below 1,000 at the end of 1924. It is also significant that when worker struggles did emerge, a central role was played by the “bang” and other provincial associations which limited interaction between workers of different geographical origins and could, according to Perry, generate violent conflicts between workers as well as support class conflicts. Harrison also notes the extent to which the working class was influenced by the symbols and values of republicanism and participated in republican symbology by, for example, hanging national flags, and involving themselves in political festivals, and calls into question whether the working class had become radicalized as a result of its struggles and exposure to the CPC.
The evidence above largely contradicts the thesis of this essay, that an urban revolution was possible, because it does not appear that the working class was revolutionary or that the CPC was an important pole of attraction. The experience which give us reason to doubt the united front is the May 30th Movement of 1925, and it is also this movement which reveals the class structure of Chinese society in the 1920s, and the extent to which struggles could rapidly evolve and threaten the class interests of the bourgeoisie. This movement, having its origins in the murder of a Chinese worker by a Japanese foreman, and immediately giving rise to a far-reaching strike wave and the creation of the Shanghai General Union, which encouraged unionization drives and kept watch over scabbing attempts, is centrally relevant for the essay not only because of the immediate increase in industrial unrest in foreign-owned factories, primarily in Shanghai, but also because the declaration of a strike and boycott of all foreign goods in Hong Kong in late June after a serious of further murders led to more than 100,000 workers in that city taking the unprecedented move of traveling to the vicinity of Canton, bringing all foreign and commercial activity to a stop, and, for the first time in China's history as a capitalist society, creating an organ of democratic working-class rule which can justifiably be described as a Soviet, as acknowledged by Isaacs. The strikers took control of gambling and opium dens and transformed them into canteens and dormitories, and an army of 2000 pickets was raised from amongst the strikers in order to put a barrier around Hong Kong and Xiamen, with all of the strikers organizing themselves into a committee of 800 delegates, with one representative for every fifty strikers, all of them subject to instant recall, who then in turn nominated thirteen men to function as an executive committee. This committee organized a hospital and seventeen schools for men and women workers and for their children were established and maintained, with special committees also handing funds and contributions, the auctioning of confiscated goods, and the keeping of records, whilst also publishing a weekly newspaper, 'The Labour Way'. Strikers were organized to undertake voluntary work, which included building a road from Canton to Whampoa, and even took control of twelve river boats to apprehend smugglers. A strikers’ court was set up which tried offenders against the boycott or other disturbers of public order. The task of covering all lines of communication along the Guangdong coast and at all ports was carried out with the co-operation of the peasant associations, due to strikers having spread to the villages to raise support for the boycott and advance the movement for agrarian reform, with peasant pickets patrolling the coast at Shantou, Haifeng, Pingshang, and other points, to make the blockade complete. The creation of this body, which, in addition to being called a Soviet, also carried the designation “Government Number Two”, can be regarded as a pivotal moment in modern Chinese history because it represented the first time that the working class had stepped forward as an autonomous force, not only challenging imperialism through mass mobilization, but also the privileges of Chinese capitalists, including their political power. The extent to which the Soviet did damage the interests of the imperialist powers is evident from the comments of an official from the British Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong, who, apart from lamenting that “the [Country] Club is empty, all servants gone”, also captured the economic impact of the boycott by pointing out that during the months before the crisis between 160 and 240 boats came through the harbour of Canton each month, but that the figures had fallen to less than 30 whilst the strike was taking place.
In truth, and owing to the nationalist character of the movement, the Soviet also involved workers lending support to the the nationalists at Whampoa. For example, workers were employed as carriers in the KMT armies whilst the committee remained in existence. This does not diminish the importance of the body, or the thesis of this essay, however, because the radical phase of the May 30th Movement also revealed that anti-imperialist struggles could not be limited to a small set of objectives, and that, when faced with an energetic movement from below, China's capitalists and the the KMT would side with imperialism. The movement, according to Waldron, was initially solely nationalist in its orientation such that the General Chamber of Commerce collected funds for the strikers in foreign-owned factories (motivated partly by the fact that these factories being out of action allowed Chinese enterprises to take control of a larger share of the market, if only for a limited period of time) and even northern warlords sought to lend support in order to avoid being seen as on the side of imperialism. The General Chamber of Commerce did not, however, join the Workers', Merchants; and Students' Federation that was set up on June 6th and when it agreed to present the Federation's demands to the Peking government in the middle of June it refused to include those demands (out of a total of seventeen) which related to the working class as well as those which posed serious challenges to imperialism, including the right to strike, Chinese control over the police of the International Settlement, and the abolition of extraterritoriality. The bourgeoisie moved closer to imperialism and the merchants withdrew from the strike when, after dialogue between these groups and foreign capitalists, the latter agreed to enhance the political strength of the former by admitting wealthy Chinese to the Municipal Council and re-opening negotiations on restoring tariff control. Isaacs also reports that at this time there was increasing interaction between workers employed in foreign-owned and indigenous enterprises and that when the latter realized that their conditions were often worse than those of their fellow workers in spite of the supposed nationalism of their employers they too began to take strike action with the aim of extracting economic concessions and union rights from their employers, and that this, combined with the decision to shut off electricity in Chinese factories on July 6th, led the bourgeoisie to openly oppose the movement by cutting off the provision of funds, and then, as the movement increasingly assumed the character of a class struggle, send in gangsters and their hired thugs to break up the General Labour Union, in cooperation with the Fengtien military clique. The same tendency for the ruling class to side with imperialism can be observed in the changing relationship between the CPC and the KMT, despite the latter being rooted primarily in the gentry, as the militant stance of the working class during the May 30th Movement as well as the expansion of the CPC, whose membership had increased to 10,000 by the end of 1925, with most of these recruits being drawn directly from the ranks of the working class, were important factors behind Chiang's March 20 coup, which resulted in the KMT's Russian advisers being placed under house arrest, the CPC being made to provide a complete list of its members to the KMT, and no longer being allowed to serve as heads of bureaus at the KMT headquarters, or send directives to its members without having first consulted with the KMT, with the CPC subsequently being prohibited from holding more than one third of the seats on executive committees at central, municipal, and district levels.
The experience of the May 30th Movement and its aftermath indicates that the CPC could rapidly transform itself into a mass organization, and that the political condition of the working class was such that Soviet power could be established at a local level, but at the same time it also demonstrated that the “bloc within” strategy represented a limitation on the party's ability to pursue state power, and that mass struggles could easily endanger the alliance, making the united front not only unnecessary, especially from 1925 onwards, but also impossible in the long-term. A further way in which the party found its political independence limited but over a longer period of time was in the area of rural policy. The Third International had explicitly stated in May 1923 that the Communists should stress the peasant movement and carry out radical land slogans whilst also demanding priority for the untied front with the KMT, which was seen as the leader of a radical land reform movement against the old gentry, but the reality was that many of its officers came from landed families and the KMT was alarmed at the Comintern's demands for land confiscation without compensation. As a result of these conflicts and the importance that was allocated to the united front above all other concerns the Comintern accepted the decision at the Fourth Congress in early 1925 that “peasants should not be allowed to decide recklessly on the reduce-rent movement” as well as the subsequent decision in July 1926 of the Central Committee plenum that the “peasant movement has developed the disease of left deviation everywhere”. In practice, the CPC's position on the agrarian question (which was also motivated partly by Chen Duxiu's opposition to anything but an urban revolution in which the peasants would be relegated to a supporting role) meant asking only for a limiting of land rent to fifty percent of the crop as against normal rents in southern China which generally reached around 2/3s of the crop or more. Bianco reports that the KMT being rooted in the gentry was a prominent feature of the 1930s Nanjing government as well and also served to limit the government's ability to carry out reform, as, despite having been supported by a wave of revolutionary fervor during the period 1926-7, the victory of the KMT owed a great deal to its cooperation with warlords, some of whom were taken into the party at the top level, and, having taken power, the KMT found that large landowners flocked to it just as they had earlier served as the pillars of Confucian orthodoxy, so that ten years after the events of 1926 the members of the KMT in any given rural locality were almost invariably the village head and government officials, which is to say they were members of the privileged landlord class. It is significant then that in spite of being forced to adopt a conservative policy the CPC still played a key role in the struggles of the Chinese countryside in the 1920s, conducted primarily through the peasant associations, which, drawing their inspiration from the famous example set by Peng Pai in Guangdong in 1920-21, rapidly grew in membership, so that in Hunan membership rose from around a third of a million in mid-1926 to 2 million by the end of the year and 4.5 million in forty-one counties just after the events of April 1927, by which point the peasant associations were able to claim more than nine million members in sixteen provinces, with the associations being especially militant and important in Guangdong and Hunan. These associations had as their role a number of functions, such as protecting their members against the exactions of landlords and tax collectors, and calling for rent reductions, and although problems were reported, such as activists having to appeal to traditional notions of justice in order to convince the peasants that their rents were unfair, peasants supporting the KMT when that party offered military support against the militias and hired thugs of the landlords, and associations not being able to break up more traditional forms of association such as the triads and lineage groups, the fact that these associations did grow shows that the peasantry was not servile, and that, if the CPC had adopted a more radical stance that more fully reflected the injustices of the Chinese countryside, the peasantry could have been mobilized alongside the working class against capitalism.
In conclusion, this essay has sought to understand the changes experienced by the CPC in the 1920s and to investigate whether at any point it was possible for the party to break free from the united front with the KMT and carry out an urban revolution, and it has been shown that the CPC was ultimately a party that was forged in the heat of class struggle, as whilst, in its early years, the CPC was centered around intellectuals, with numerous ideological and organizational flaws, its immersion in mass movements and struggles such as May 30th turned it into a party whose members were drawn from the ranks of the working class and numbered in excess of 50,000 prior to the fatal events of April 1927. The experience of May 30th showed that workers could, when mobilized, develop their own institutions of political power, and that, when confronted with widespread political participation, elites would have no choice but to take the side of imperialism. The inability of a militant working class and a party with its roots in rural and industrial elites to exist alongside each other and pursue their goals without coming into conflict with one another were revealed fully through the tragic events of 1927, and although the CPC was able to survive, it did so at a terrible cost, due to its organic link with the working class being effectively severed. In this sense 1927 brought to an end a revolutionary situation not only in China during the period 1925-27 but also on an international scale, which had begun with the revolution of 1917, and which, when brought to a close, was followed by the darkness of the 1930s.
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Chesneaux, 'The Chinese Labour Movement 1919-1927' (1980)
De Ven, 'From Friend to Comrade' (1992)
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