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Some people familiar with China's history have come to the conclusion that in order to achieve big things in China a person must:
1. love talent as much as life;
2. spend money like it grows on trees; and
3. kill without a second thought.
This assessment held true up to October 1, 1949, and no one exemplified the last two criteria more perfectly than Chiang Kai-shek. For quite some time it seemed that Chiang, and only Chiang, was destined to become the ruler of China.
As a young student in Japan, Chiang wrote this poem on the back of his photograph given to a cousin:
The dark fog of death covers the earth. Woe to the weak who are no match to their foe! I have traveled east to fulfill my duty and save my homeland. Personal honors and title are not what I seek!
Chiang had a hand in every incident of killing Chinese Communists. He was the master mind behind the Zhongshan Warship Incident on March 20, 1026; the Shanghai Massacre on April 12, 1927; the South Anhui Incident 16 in January 1941; and the attack on the Central Plain Liberated Area on June 26, 1946. Some 337,000 Communists, Youth League members and other revolutionaries were killed between April 1927 and June 1928. By the beginning of 1932, one million had died. Among the communist leaders killed were Luo Yinong, Zhao Shiyan, Chen Yannian, Li Qihan, Xiao Chunu, Deng Pei, Xiang Jingyu, Xiong Xiong, Peng Pai, Zhang Tailei, Qu Qiubai, Yun Daiying and Fang Zhimin.
Zhou Enlai once lamented, “Our enemy can destroy our revolutionary leadership in a matter of minutes, but we can't rebuild our leadership in just a few minutes.”
The mounting death toll among their leaders put the CPC in a difficult situation.
Chen Mingshu, a KMT patriotic general, wrote as follows in “Thoughts on the Fourth Anniversary of the September 18th Incident”: “Alas! Thousands of hot-blooded young men and women died because of the order to ‘stop the activities’ in the name of ‘cleansing the party,’ cutting short the lives of millions of our youth who had visions for China, deeming it necessary in order to ‘save the party.’ It was actually an unprecedented loss. The First Emperor of Qin's purge of the scholars could not have been as damaging.”
The White Terror that Chiang brought to China may well be the ultimate White Terror in world history.
The Bolsheviks were lucky by comparison.
Lenin was arrested and exiled twice.
Trotsky was arrested and exiled twice.
Bukharin was arrested and exiled three times.
Kamenev was sentenced to exile for life.
Kalinin was arrested and exiled many times, as were Dzerzhinsky, Ordzhonikidze and Kuybyshev. Sverdlov spent altogether 12 years of his life in prison.
Stalin was arrested and exiled an astonishing seven times.
Suppose Tsar Nicholas II of Russia had been like Chiang, how many of the senior Bolsheviks would have survived? Who would have survived to lead the October Revolution that shaped the entire 20th century?
In China, by contrast, a Communist stood little chance of surviving his or her first arrest. Xiang Zhongfa, CPC general-secretary, immediately changed sides after his arrest, but Chiang allowed him to live for just three days. The word “exile” was never in Chiang's lexicon of political persecution. The only words that he knew were “execution by firing squad,” “beheading,” “execution effective immediately,” “immediate decapitation,” and “execution immediately on receipt of this telegram.”
Only a handful of the Communists walked away alive. Chen Geng, who had saved Chiang's life in a military campaign, was one of the few lucky ones. To kill the person who once saved your life can do one's reputation no good at all, so Chiang grudgingly released him. It was in October 1925, when the division under Chiang's command was trapped near Huayang in a very perilous situation. Chiang ordered Chen, company commander of the Fourth Regiment: no retreat. A few months earlier, Chiang and Liao Zhongkai had signed into effect a code that held the head of a battle unit personally responsible for deserting their positions under hostile fire. “The squad leader shall be executed if his squad retreats,” said the code. “The platoon leader shall be executed if his platoon retreats. The company commander shall be executed if his company retreats. The battalion commander shall be executed if his battalion retreats. The regiment commander shall be executed if his regiment retreats. The division commander shall be executed if his division retreats.” Unfortunately for Chiang, the enemy aggression was so overwhelming that the entire Third Division was abandoning its position, leaving no one behind to execute. Chen put Chiang onto his back, still shouting commands to soldiers running for their lives, and carried him running to the river, where they eventually got a boat across to safety on the other bank. “Thanks to the blessing of Mr. Premier from beyond the grave, we were able to win by a surprise move, turning danger into safety.” That was Chiang's version, but he knew he owed his life to Chen. As a result, when Chen was arrested in Shanghai in March 1933, Chiang immediately had him moved to the City of Nanchang hoping he would personally talk him into defecting. The story goes that when Chiang walked in, Chen hid his face behind a newspaper. Thinking he was reading the paper, Chiang walked to Chen's left, only to have Chen move the paper to that side. Chiang then walked to his prisoner's right side, but the paper went up again. Realizing there was nothing for it, Chiang walked off with a wry smile of resignation. A month later, Chiang had Chen “accompanied” on a walk outside of detention, allowing his escape.
This was the sole exception.
No such generosity was shown to any other detainees. Chiang even killed Deng Yanda, a long-time colleague, provost of the Whampoa Military Academy and director of political affairs of the National Revolutionary Army, who was not even a Communist but merely a member of a third party. Chen Cheng's plea for mercy cut no ice either: Chiang was intent on killing.
So why did Communists keep coming back despite all the killings? What made the Red force in China so resilient? What made the Communists wipe the blood from their faces, bury their comrades and return to the fight?
It was a mystery of modern China that all wanted to solve.
Wang Jingwei, once chairman of the central political conference of the KMT, believed the answer lay in the bankruptcy of China's agriculture.
Addressing a KMT conference in Nanjing on January 20, 1934, Wang said:
“The rise of the communist insurgents is the result of peasants losing their livelihood. On top of this, over the past decades, the economy has been backward, the countryside is crumbling and the number of jobless defies counting. Men with evil ambitions are taking advantage of this mess and trying to emulate Li Zicheng and Zhang Xianzhong (peasant uprising leaders trying to overthrow the Ming Dynasty regime). Take Jiangxi as an example. Its population is down to six million. This is a disaster worse than flooding. As well as tackling the symptoms by clearing out the commies, our party must do all in its power to get to the root of the problem and fix agriculture.”
Wang was a charismatic orator. It was he who drafted Sun's testaments and he who was called by Sun on his deathbed. He was also a man with a taste for the dramatic.
In November 1909, Wang sneaked into Beijing from Hong Kong with Huang Fusheng and Yu Peilun on a mission to assassinate Prince Regent Zaifeng. The assassination of Japanese Prime Minister Itō Hirobumi by An Jung-geun, a Korean activist, had rattled the world and inspired Wang, who had been bitterly disappointed by the failures of the revolutionaries and who saw the Qing government's plan to switch to a constitutional monarchy as a sham. In Wang Jingwei's view, killing a top official of the royal administration would kick the revolution into high gear. It would also be a riposte to royalists' mockery, who accused Sun of “calling on others to revolt while he stays safe and far from danger, welcomed wherever he goes. Is being a great man this easy?” Thus challenged, Wang decided to prove the revolutionaries' resolve through blood.
But resolve and action are not the same. Between the three would-be assassins, there was death wish aplenty but little assassination know-how. None of them was as cool under pressure as An Jung-geun. After spending more than three months plotting the placement of the bomb, the location remained undecided.
The residence of the prince regent was close to Ya'er Lane by the Houhai Lake, just outside Di'anmen. The conspirators first considered placing the bomb on Drum Tower Street. Then they went for Yandai Xiejie Street. Both possibilities were ruled out and they eventually picked Yintongdao Bridge. The physical planting of the bomb proved even harder. Their first attempt failed because of dogs barking in the neighborhood as they tried to dig a hole under the bridge. Unnerved, they aborted and decided to return the following night, which they did. But hardly had Huang and Yu buried the bomb than they were spotted by passersby. All three were arrested.
Wang thought he was going to die. The quixotic, amateur assassin in him gave way to a brave, determined martyr. While in prison, he wrote thousands of words of testimony denouncing the Qing government and a poem to celebrate sacrifice:
Let's walk down the street and sing an assassin's song.
Let's walk into prison and know it's the right place to be.
As they grind the executioner's axe, we'll laugh along,
Knowing it's the best way to go, young and free.
The poem has since brought many patriots to tears. As one of the most passionate, romantic and charismatic radicals of his time, Wang presented a near-perfect portrait of a revolutionary. Who would think this famous revolutionary would go on to become China's most notorious defector?
Things seem to be heading in one direction and then unexpectedly turn the opposite way, making history so notoriously unpredictable.
Zinoviev, a Bolshevik and chairman of the Comintern, called himself a statesman who “sees everything before it happens,” but he failed to see the future in which he would be executed by Stalin on charges of “relying on the fascists.” Nor could Wang Jingwei, the famous assassin on the eve of the Revolution of 1911, see into his future and predict meeting his own would-be assassin on the eve of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression.
On November 1, 1935, during the KMT congress in Nanjing just as the party leaders were finishing their photo opportunity, a journalist, Sun Fengming, pulled a pistol from his coat and fired three shots at Wang.
Unlike Wang's plot to take out the prince regent, Sun Fengming was quick and decisive.
The guards fired back and the convention collapsed into chaos as delegates scrambled for the door. Zhang Jingjiang who had some difficulty with his legs could not move fast enough, and was pushed to the ground.
The bullet that lodged in Wang's rib cage eventually proved fatal.
Nine years later on November 10, 1944, Wang died from complications of this gunshot wound while seeking medical treatment in Japan.
Wang's place in China's modern history began with his assassination attempt and ended with him being a victim of assassination. He made a name for himself as a virtuous revolutionary, but is remembered by generations after his death as the number one traitor in China.
Suppose history had happened differently and Prince Regent Zaifeng had actually had Wang executed, then China's modern history would have one more hero to celebrate and one less traitor to condemn.
Had they died then, who would know them for what they truly were?
How truly this question applies to Wang Jingwei!
But he thought the plight of the rural peasantry could explain why the Red political power managed to survive in China.
Wang's arch-enemy, Chiang Kai-shek, had an alternative theory.
Speaking on behalf of Chiang at a government meeting on May 12, 1931, He Yingqin briefed KMT officials on the campaign to encircle the Communists. Asked “why have the Red insurgents been gaining momentum,” he gave a five-point explanation:
“One, over the years, when the warlords changed sides, their troops went rogue and banded together to form pockets of independent groups, armed with weapons that were unaccounted for amid chaos. Taking advantage of their local geography, they have been able to cause a lot of damage.
“Two, the Red imperialists have an evil plan to swallow up China and turn it into their supplier of raw materials as well as a market for their products.
“Three, the economic onslaught of the white imperialists has driven the peasantry to the edge of bankruptcy, fueling unemployment and misery in the countryside. Many have joined the insurgency out of sheer desperation.
“Four, our education system has failed our youth. They have gained knowledge at school, but they have not been given the moral compass to guide them. Most of the young men act on an impulse. Very few have the virtue of perseverance.
“Five, civil society is falling apart. After thousands of years under the yoke of autocracy, the people then suffer the brutal regimes of the warlords. As a result, communities have lost the ability to organize on their own. People show little will and courage to even defend themselves.
“These are the reasons why the Red insurgency has been worsening like a festering wound.... If we don't give our all, then we may well relive the nightmare of the Huang Chao rebellion in the late Tang Dynasty or the terror of the homicidal insurgents of the late Ming Dynasty.”
Reasons one, four and five were domestic and the KMT could not shirk responsibility for them. Reason three blamed “the white imperialists,” or Western countries such as Britain, the US and Japan. But since these countries were backing the KMT, he went no further than use the term “economic onslaught” and described the damage to rural peasantry as merely bankruptcy rather than collapse.
He talked at length only about reason two - “the Red imperialists.”
The Red imperialists, he said, “support their henchmen in every possible way and have them spy on China for them. They also use them as a counterbalance against the European nations and the US to gain diplomatic wins. That's why they would not hesitate to throw China to the wolves. Our country has known insurgencies in its history, but this time is different. The Red insurgents have international connections and foreign financial backing. They are very well trained and organized, and all the more rampant as a result.”
By this reasoning, Soviet Russia was totally to blame for the fact that communist organizations kept emerging and the Red regime kept spreading across China despite multiple crackdowns, and the Communist-led revolution was nothing more than a proxy war.
This argument was the KMT's weapon of choice for decades.
But the weapon of choice was not backed up by common sense.
Soviet Russia and the Comintern backed various revolutionary factions in China, not just the CPC. Ironically most of the Soviet aid went to the KMT itself.
After signing the joint manifesto with Sun, Joffe announced an aid package of two million roubles, 8,000 rifles, 15 machine guns, four cannons and two armored vehicles to the KMT. Military trainers would also come to China to help found military academies.
According to the account of Wang Boling, head of the faculty of the training department of Whampoa Military Academy, Sun ordered 300 Mauser rifles prior to the opening of the academy. However, the arms factories in Guangdong were too busy fulfilling orders from the warlords and pushed back the academy's order. As a result, the academy had only 30 rifles when it opened its doors, barely enough to arm the guards. Liao Zhongkai tried everything in his power to push the order but to no avail. Then came the Soviet ship with 8,000 rifles, each one bayonet-fitted and each with 500 bullets. The shipment also included 10 pistols. The students burst into cheers, Wang Boling recalled, describing the Soviet gift as “the best news ever, with every officer and student alike jubilant.… We didn't have to worry any more. We were now in a position to launch the revolution.”
The founding of the Whampoa Academy, so vaunted by Chiang Kai-shek, was actually funded by Soviet Russia. The KMT was able to build its armed forces purely thanks to Russian aid of two million roubles and the weapons.
In addition to money and arms, Soviet Russia also dispatched military advisors to China. Among them were Mikhail Markovich Borodin, the KMT's central political advisor; Vasily Blyukher, the military advisor; Alexander Cherepanov, the Whampoa chief advisor; N. A. Shevaldin (Pribylev), the infantry advisor; Gennady Gilev, the artillery advisor; Vladimir Polyak, the engineering advisor; and Victor Rogachev, the political advisor. They advised the Chinese on military and political affairs, and wrote training programs in tactics, weapons, construction, geography and transportation, laying the foundations for what would be the crack fighting force of the Whampoa party army.
More Russian shipments arrived, and one of the large ones, which arrived in Guangzhou in 1925, included military equipment worth 564,000 roubles. In 1926, four shipments of mixed weaponry came to Guangzhou.
The first shipment included 4,000 Japanese-made rifles, four million bullets and 1,000 swords.
The second shipment included 9,000 Soviet-made rifles and three million bullets.
The third shipment included 40 machine guns, 4,000 bandoliers, 12 cannons and 1,000 shells.
The fourth shipment included 5,000 rifles, five million bullets, 50 machine guns and 12 cannons.
After triumphing in the second Northern Expedition, Chiang Kai-shek asked rhetorically in Shantou, “Where did we learn the organizational tactics for our army? You probably don't know. But to be honest, we really copied the Soviet Red Army.” He added, “Had it not been for the help of Soviet comrades showing us the way, we would still have no National Revolutionary Army to speak of.” Chiang was acutely aware that the Whampoa army's victory was due in large part to the weapons and advisors from Soviet Russia.
And for that the Kuomintang was accused of being the “Rouble Party.”
Asked by a reporter in 1924 about the alleged “5,000 roubles monthly payment from the Russian Bolsheviks” and the “Soviet funds for the military academy in Guangzhou,”Sun Yat-sen and Wang Jingwei gave evasive answers.
There had to be documentary evidence to support allegations about funding, they said. The reporter should produce evidence to back the accusation that the KMT was receiving Soviet money. If he could not, he risked being held not just morally blameworthy but also legally responsible for defamation.
But Sun and Wang pushed their case further: They would not apologize for accepting foreign funding. No political parties or schools in the world would reject help, they argued. Even if investigations bore out the allegation of Russian aid, they said, there would be nothing wrong about that. Why did the reporter question their motives, they asked?
Chiang, who would later accuse the Communists of having foreign ties and financial aid, made the case for his own party.
On December 11, 1926, at a party in Shantou to honor the Soviet advisors, after the second Northern Expedition, Chiang said:
“Some say that we, the Chinese Revolutionary Party, take orders from the Russians, and the people making this accusation believe it to be the strongest case against us. To my mind, such people are at best pre-19 century nationalist heroes who know nothing but nationalism. They don't understand that this is a different age. Their insular position might have been considered patriotic decades back when China's doors were closed to the outside world, but not in the 20th century. Today, China's problems are the world's problems. Our revolution will not succeed if we don't have a worldwide vision for it and work with every nation that treats us as their equals.”
Chiang certainly had a way with words.
The Soviets also backed Feng Yuxiang in the north just as they backed Sun and Chiang in the south.
Between March 1925 and July 1926, Feng's Nationalist Army received 38,828 Russian rifles, 17,029 Japanese rifles, 12 million German bullets, 46.2 million 7.6mm rifle bullets, 48 cannons, 12 mountain guns, 10,000 hand grenades, 230 machine guns with bullets, 18 mortars and large quantities of medicine.
In late October 1926, his army received another 3,500 rifles, 11.5 million bullets, three aircrafts, 4,000 sabers and 10 flamethrowers from Russia.
The Soviets also sent military advisors. According to Feng's account, they included “experts in infantry, artillery, cavalry and engineering.” Russian advisors helped Feng build arms factories, manufacture munitions and train engineers. The Chinese also built their first armored vehicles using Russian designs.
During his visit to the Soviet Union in March 1926, after resigning from public office, Feng signed a deal with the Russians that allowed the Chinese army to take an arms loan of 11 million roubles. The Russians also assigned Usmanov as Feng's chief advisor in military affairs to help him run battlefield operations.
This is why, after Chiang and Feng betrayed the revolution, Borodin, fired as the KMT's political advisor and scapegoated, told Feng in Zhengzhou, “The success achieved in the Chinese national revolution so far is because Soviet Russia spent more than 30 million roubles on it, and I personally put in so much effort.”
Such was the huge involvement of Soviet Russia with the KMT's the national revolution.
In comparison, Soviet Russia and the Comintern provided little help to the Chinese Communists. The CPC was also more cautious than the Kuomintang about accepting foreign aid.
Until the Comintern advisor Voitinsky came to China in April 1920, Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao earned a living by teaching, editing publications and writing articles. Their entire savings were spent on the running of a couple of magazines and they had no funds to develop movements among students, workers, or soldiers.
Once Voitinsky and others came to China, the building of the Communist Party of China began in earnest. As the amount of work increased, so did expenses. Besides, most Party members could no longer teach, edit or publish on the side, not to say that the cost for running the journals and the workers' night schools and publishing books was too high to pay. As a result, the CPC's Shanghai branch started to accept funding that Voitinsky helped provide, setting a precedent. Much of the early funding was temporary in nature, and it dried up once Voitinsky left China in January 1921. The Party's publicity initiatives had to stop, so did the educational programs for workers. When Bao Huiseng was sent to Guangzhou to brief Chen Duxiu on their work, the Party could not even afford to pay for the travel and had to take out a loan from a private lender.
But the early Communists remained cautious about taking foreign aid, even though they had trouble paying travel costs.
Chen Duxiu maintained that they should keep their day jobs as they engaged in revolutionary work. “The revolution is our own job,” he told Bao. “If we get help, that's great. But if we don't, we'll still go ahead with it. We can wage a revolution without other people funding us.”
He argued against accepting Comintern funds or reporting to and taking guidance from it.
When Chen worked as the head of education commission in Guangzhou, the city's newspapers attacked him, accusing him of worshiping the rouble and of pursuing a rouble-driven doctrine. Under pressure, Chen became even more reluctant to accept aid, maintaining that the Communists were trading their autonomy for funds and that their work must be free of foreign interference.
All Party members wanted independence, but without a reliable source of finance, this was no more than rhetoric.
Shortly after Maring, the Comintern representative, arrived in China in 1921, he had a meeting with Li Hanjun and Li Da, who then ran the Communists' Shanghai branch. Maring told them the Comintern was willing to provide economic help but they must first submit their work plan and budget. Li Hanjun and Li Da said they welcomed foreign aid, but they must decide how the funds were used. Otherwise, they said, they would not expect to operate on the Comintern's financial support.
And that cast a dark shadow on their future relationship.
Zhang Guotao's attitude was different. He was the first of the CPC leaders to argue for accepting foreign aid and he wasted no time in presenting Maring with a proposal to form a trade union secretariat, together with a monthly budget of more than 1,000 yuan and a work plan to go with it.
Zhang was not making an exorbitant demand. The budget was carefully worked out and presented with caution.
But as soon as he returned to Shanghai, Chen Duxiu censured Zhang, calling his plan an act of renting out the revolution. The Chinese revolution and everything about it were their responsibility, he said, and every Party member must pitch in and work without financial reward. Such, he insisted, was their firm policy.
Insisting on that stance, Chen ran the negotiation with Maring into the ground. “Maring insisted on following Comintern protocol and bringing the Chinese Communists' work under the command of the Comintern,” Bao Huiseng later recalled. “They argued that the Comintern was the global headquarters of the communist movement and that the communist party in each country was a branch of the Comintern.”
Chen thought otherwise. He said the CPC “is still young and every aspect of work has yet to develop. It does not seem imperative to wear a Comintern hat at present. The Chinese revolution must be done in the particular reality of China and it does not have to rely on the financial aid of the Comintern for now. Let's maintain a fraternal relationship between the Chinese and Russian communist parties. Once we've established a strong foothold in China and when it becomes necessary, we will ask the Comintern for assistance. This way we can avert the rumors and slanders originated with the China's anarchists and other parties.”
They went through several rounds of heated discussions without reaching agreement. Maring's translator, Zhang Tailei, impatiently reminded Chen that the Comintern ran the communist movement across the world and China could not be the exception. Infuriated, Chen snapped back: “Every country has its own reality for the revolution to take place there,” he said, pounding the table. “China is a backward country with a weak economy. We will reserve the right to act independently and we will do things our own way. We will push as far as our resources allow us, but no one is going to pull us by the nose!”
With that Chen grabbed his briefcase and left the meeting. Nobody could stop him.
Whether they should report to the Comintern in exchange for its funds and leadership was the first quandary facing the CPC since its formation in July 1921 and it provoked the first major row with the CPC Central Committee.
But the question of funding was a very real one and before long, even the indignant Chen could no longer “work for the Party for free.” Now that he made himself a career revolutionary, he lost his day job and a secure income. The Commercial Press offered him a position as honorary editor, with a monthly salary of 300 yuan, which he accepted. But this arrangement was short-lived, since he spent most of his time on Party matters and was too busy to work for the Shanghai-based publisher.
Strapped for cash, Chen came to frequent the East Asia Library.
The library staff all came from Anhui, Chen's home province, and he was entitled to royalties for a collection of his essays that the library had published. When he was out of cash, he would pay the library a visit but never explicitly asked for money. Wang Mengzou, the chief librarian, knew why he was sitting there for long. “Can we get you some money?” Wang would ask. Chen would nod, take the money and sit for a while longer before leaving.
But Chen was still against accepting Comintern aid, and relations remained the same until the time of his arrest.
On October 4, 1921, Chen was arrested by officers of the French concession when meeting with Yang Mingzhai, Bao Huiseng, Ke Qingshi and two other Party officials in his apartment. He gave a fake name, Wang Tanfu, but could not hide his true identity for long. Shao Lizi and Chu Fucheng were also brought in for questioning. As soon as Chu spotted Chen at the police station, he grabbed him by the hand and asked, “Zhongfu (Chen's courtesy name), what's going on? I was nabbed the moment I reached your place.”
Chen's cover was well and truly blown.
Chen's arrest made the headlines in every major newspaper. Li Da appealed to Party branches across China to send people to Shanghai to help and wired Sun Yat-sen for assistance. Sun immediately spoke to the consul of the French concession in Shanghai asking for Chen to be treated with leniency.
But it was Maring, the Comintern envoy, who played the key role in getting Chen released. He hired an expensive French lawyer to handle his case.
On October 26, a court in Shanghai ordered Chen's release on payment of a small fine of 100 yuan.
Chen was anticipating seven or eight years in prison. After he got out, he learned that it was Maring who had come to the rescue, spending a great deal of money and pulling many strings to get him and the others out of jail.
As Li Da put it, Maring was there to hold the Chinese Communists' hands through a difficult time.
This experience impressed Chen deeply. This experience brought home to him that the Party needed money not only to expand and stay active but also to rescue their comrades from prison or firing squads. A scholarly self-righteous claim of independence did not help the fact that they were broke. The arrest also brought Chen, an emotionally responsive personality, closer to Maring. “They had two rounds of talks and became friendly,” Li Da later recalled. “Every problem was properly solved.”
It takes ideals and a political belief to build a party, make it strong and make it grow, but it also takes money. The Chinese Communists, with all their idealism and commitment to the communist doctrine, spent a lot of time arguing before accepting this fact.
According to Bao Huiseng's account, the consensus reached between Chen and Maring covered these points:
1. The headquarters of the worldwide communist movement was in Moscow, with the communist party of an individual country being a branch and outpost of that movement.
2. There were financial ties between the Red International of Labor Unions (RILU) and the Chinese Trade Union Secretariat, and the annual plan and budget of the latter were to be reviewed and approved by RILU.
3. The CPC Central Committee did not receive financial aid from the Comintern. Its essential expenditures would be covered by the Trade Union Secretariat.
Acknowledging the financial ties between the secretariat, an office under the authority of the CPC Central Committee, and the RILU provided a way around Chen's refusal to accept Comintern aid. But it established the fact that the Chinese Communists were now putting themselves under the leadership of the Comintern and accepting its financial aid.
The second CPC congress approved the proposal to join the Comintern.
So how much aid did the Comintern give the CPC?
Way less than it gave to the KMT.
According to Chen's report to Comintern on June 30, 1922, his party received a total of 16,655 yuan in foreign aid between October 1921 and June 1922. When the number of Party members was still low, the CPC spent on average 40 to 50 yuan for each member each year. But in the years following 1925, as the Party expanded, foreign aid fell short and the per capita spending each year fell from 40 yuan to 4 yuan in 1927. Most of the Russian aid went to the KMT.
The amount of foreign aid was modest but crucial to the Chinese Communists in their early years.
According to Chen's estimate, about 94 percent of the Party's funding came from the Comintern. Of this, 60 percent was spent on workers' movements. The newly formed CPC could not have emerged as a major player in workers' movements without the Comintern financial aid. It could not have done so without committing most of the funds received for workers' movements.
As the Party organization developed and with more career revolutionaries, so too did its expenses. In the 1920s, fulltime Party workers were paid an allowance of 30 to 40 yuan each month. While the Second Party Congress made some specific rules on collecting membership fees, most Party members were poor and few fees were actually collected. After the Second Congress, “the Party received almost all its funds from the Comintern,”Chen told the Party's Third Congress.
Between January and July 1927, the CPC raised 3,000 yuan in membership fees. By comparison, its expenditure was 180,000 yuan during the same period. But the Party received nearly 1 million yuan that year from international benefactors such as the Comintern, the RILU, the Young Comintern Division, the Peasant International and International Red Aid. Funds came in the form of membership fees, workers' movement fees, Youth League membership fees, peasants' movement fees, soldiers' movement fees, aid work fees and anti-imperialist work fees.
The Party was able to raise less than 0.3 percent of its expenditure. While the actual amount of foreign aid received was small compared to what was given to the KMT, Comintern assistance was very important for the Chinese Communists.
The Comintern aid was a big help to the infant CPC which had barely a cent to its name. But the limited amount of aid put the CPC in a dependent relationship with the Comintern and hurt the Chinese Communists to an extent.
Three Party leaders in the history of the CPC attempted to shake free of the Comintern.
Chen Duxiu was the first.
Chen was a man of strong personality, candid, and not inclined to take orders from others. Taking money from others obliged you to go along with them, in his view. “We must work independently and not give control to others,” he said. He was right, but how could they achieve independence from foreign influence without even having the money to get Chen out of prison? It was mere wishful thinking to speak of fraternal relations between the CPC and the Comintern after acceptance of aid made the Party a branch of the Comintern.
In the spring of 1922, Maring recommended that CPC members join the KMT in order to form KMT-CPC cooperation. Chen strongly objected. “The CPC works on a different revolutionary platform than the KMT,” he wrote in a letter to Voitinsky. “Their bases are different too.” The KMT had “policies irreconcilable with communism.” The people saw the KMT “as a power-hungry political party out for themselves, and the CPC would lose credibility with the public (especially with the youth) if its members joined the KMT. It would never have a future.”
Maring's proposal was a creative one. Drawing on his experience in the Dutch colonies, where a united front had proved successful in the independence struggle, Maring saw the CPC as a minor political party made up of a few dozen intellectuals unable to keep pace with the post-May 4th revolutionary dynamics of China. Moreover, Sun Yat-sen rejected the idea of a bipartisan coalition. Joining the KMT thus became the CPC's only option, because that would allow its Party workers to exploit the KMT's apparatus and political influence across China so as to reach the peasants and factory workers and achieve rapid growth. It was a perfect balance of tactics and strategy for the revolution at the time.
But Maring's proposal was full of risks, too. All were meant to join the KMT in their individual capacity, but the CPC was small and weak while the KMT was monolithic and strong. How could the CPC maintain its independence and not be swallowed whole? How could it preserve its edge and not become a party of elitist bureaucrats? How could it stay true to its belief and not become an appendage of others? If mismanaged, a good tactical move risked becoming a bad opportunistic one because of the sacrifice of principles involved.
Maring's proposal was also based on some wrong assumptions. He believed that only two possibilities lay open for the Chinese revolution: Either the Communists joined the KMT, or the communist movement ground to a halt in China. In his view, getting the Communists to join the KMT was a matter of life or death for the communist movement in China. In his report to the Comintern Executive Committee, he wrote, “Chinese political life is totally controlled by foreign influences. At the present period there is not a single class mature enough to take on political leadership.” That was another wrong assessment.
Creativity, risk and misjudgment were thus bundled together in a single fantasy package.
But even as Maring was stressing the pros of joining the KMT, Chen was stressing the cons. They reached stalemate again just as they had done on the funding issue earlier.
But this time, the impasse was short, since the Chinese had conceded that “the communist party in each country is a branch of the Comintern.”
Refused by Chen, Maring referred the matter up the chain of command. Between July 1922 and May 1923, the Comintern issued a series of orders and directives approving Maring's proposal and ordering the CPC to follow through. The Comintern also ordered the CPC Central Committee to “work closely” with Maring “on everything pertinent to party affairs.”
So, in August 1922, Maring attended the meeting of the CPC central leadership being held in Hangzhou. Even though most of the communist leaders disagreed with the Comintern decision they went along with it.
Practice is the only true test of theory. With the benefit of hindsight, looking at revolutionary practice of the 1920s, one can see that the Comintern decision on the CPC-KMT cooperation was mostly right. It was right because it paved the way for the success of the Northern Expedition. It was mostly right because, despite its breezy stipulations that “the Chinese Communists must not lose their unique political identity” and “undoubtedly the leadership should go to the working class party,” it made no arrangements or actionable plans and did not trust the power and the ability of the Chinese Communists. And it sowed the seeds of failure for the Great Revolution.
The value of an objective and the risk involved are in direct proportion. That is a hard and unavoidable fact about any decision.
Chen was between a rock and a hard place.
In May 1920, Li Dazhao, believing his and Chen's study of Marxism to be inadequate and their understanding of Russian conditions too modest, argued that they “should focus on Marxist study first.” Chen disagreed. “We don't have to be the Chinese Marx and Engels,” he said. “We only need to be practitioners and students of Marxism at the same time.”
Chen thought his way was the more achievable, and he would later follow his own advice, only to realize how much harder it was to study and practice Marxism at the same time.
Chen's leadership was long seen as patriarchal and despotic. Bao Huiseng nailed it with this observation “Later (after accepting Russian funds) it wasn't the same. We'd all obey the Comintern and he couldn't be the patriarch even if he tried.”
Despite having been the powerful leader of the New Culture Movement 17 and, in Mao Zedong's words, “the commander-in-chief of the May 4th era,” Chen nevertheless made his share of mistakes during the Great Revolution period. Still, under the command of Comintern he simply had to follow orders even when he knew they made no sense. Yet when the Great Revolution failed, he was still the one to bear most of the blame. It was more than a personal tragedy. A Pravda editorial attacked him and called him “an unrepentant opportunist, effectively an agent planted inside the Party by Wang Jingwei.” Such vituperative labeling may sound eerily familiar to many in China. It is uncanny to think how the Russian Communists used such language way back in the 1920s, as if the seeds of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) came from Russia and not China.
Isolated following his ousting, Chen was repeatedly heard saying, “The Chinese revolution should be led by Chinese.”
After Chen, the second Chinese Party leader to try for independence was Li Lisan.
In 1930 when Chiang Kai-shek went to war with Feng Yuxiang and Yan Xishan in the Central Plains War 18 , Li believed that KMT rule was collapsing and the Chinese revolution would become the ultimate class war in the world. He asked the Soviet Union to “prepare for war at all speed” and requested that “Mongolia should make an announcement immediately after the riots in China succeed and proclaim itself as part of the Chinese Soviet Federation. Then it should send a large number of troops to northern China.… The 100,000 Chinese workers in Siberia should be armed fast and trained in our political belief in preparation for war with Japanese imperialists. They should leave Mongolia to help China and start marching against the enemy.” In Li's violent scenario, China was at the hub of revolution worldwide and the Comintern had but a supporting role to help execute the battle plan.
Li violated a big taboo.
The Soviet Union and Comintern's guidance of the Chinese revolution boiled down to being “the center of world revolution,” a policy centered on its own interests, seeking allies in China so as to deflect the imperialist pressure and protect the world's first socialist country.
In April 1920, an envoy sent by the Comintern and the Soviet politburo pointed out that the policy in the Far East was founded on fomenting clashes between Japan, the USA and China and doing all possible to make them worse. Helping the Chinese revolution was an afterthought on Soviet Russia's agenda. All the funding it provided the KMT and the CPC to sustain the Northern Expedition was aligned to the best interests of the Soviet Union. But now came Li, who would not stop talking about “riots,” asked the Soviet Union to drop its new five-year plan and “prepare for war,” and wanted troops to “leave Mongolia to help China and start marching against the enemy.” His demand that the Soviet Union disregard its own security and support the Chinese revolution stupefied the Comintern and the USSRCP.
Li's idea was totally detached from reality and caused great damage to the Chinese revolution. It sent the arrogant message that the CPC would not listen to the Comintern despite accepting its support and funding. Even more arrogantly, it called for the Soviet Union to abandon its five-year plan and for Mongolia to join the Chinese Soviet Federation.
The Comintern reacted fast and harshly: It suspended funding for the CPC Central Committee.
It was the worst sanction the CPC had incurred in its lifetime.
After having his party's funding cut off, Li's position was untenable and he had to step down.
The experiences of Chen and Li affirm the simple fact that a political party cannot achieve independence simply because its leaders wish it so. It can only be done when the circumstances permit. The Chinese Communists had to achieve political and military maturity and, most importantly, financial self-reliance before they could reshape their relationship with the Comintern. That is why the credit for finally setting the Chinese revolution on a self-steered course goes to Mao Zedong.
Sun Yat-sen, with his joint manifesto with Joffe, made clear that he did not believe a Red power would work in China.
Chiang Kai-shek, with his five conclusions, opined that the Red regime was essentially a Trojan horse for “the evil plan of the Red imperialists.”
Josef Stalin, intent on “squeezing the lemon,” doubted the Chinese Communists could survive independently from the KMT.
And Trotsky believed that taking the Soviet movement to the rural areas after the revolution failed was both impossible and too late.
Nevertheless, the Red power was formed, gained a foothold and managed to grow fast in China. Who can explain this?
The gunfire of the Russian Revolution delivered Marx-Leninism to China. From Moscow, China received organizational guidance and even some funds. But Moscow did not teach the Chinese about enclaves of armed forces of workers and peasants. It did not teach them about besieging cities from the countryside, nor did it teach them how political power comes from the barrels of the gun.
On the eve of the fall of the Winter Palace, the Bolsheviks had not established their regime. On the eve of the revolution, Lenin had to hide away in a lakeside hut in Razliv on the Russian border with Finland and did not return to Petrograd in disguise until the armed uprising was less than 20 days away.
Later, the socialist powers that proliferated across Eastern Europe were set up under the protection of the Soviet Red Army following the defeat of Nazi Germany. With the disappearance of Russian backing, not least military backing in the form of armed intervention, the mighty Berlin Wall collapsed like ice cream melting in the sun.
It was a similar story with Vietnam and Korea.
Fidel Castro's guerrilla fighters did not establish a regime of their own until they overthrew the Cuban government.
Nor did Che Guevara when he dodged the Bolivian army in the jungles of South America.
It was not that Lenin, Ho Chi Minh, Castro and Guevara lacked the desire to form their own regimes: It was impossible for them to do so.
So what made it possible in China?
In November 1931, 18 years before the founding of the People's Republic of China, Mao Zedong proclaimed the birth of the Chinese Soviet Republic at the First National Congress of the Chinese Workers, Peasants and Soldiers Soviet. And pockets of Red power bases across the country had long thrived and functioned as fully-fledged governing bodies before this Soviet republic was announced.
Why was it possible in China?
There is not a single encyclopedia in the world that can answer this question.
In The Man Who Lost China , published in 1975 shortly following the death of Chiang Kai-shek, the biographer Brian Crozier makes this observation about Chiang:
“Chiang Kai-shek possessed courage, stamina and leadership. He was not only a flawed man, but also a tragic character in the Greek sense of the word. His tragedy was of his own making.” “Chiang lacked a prerequisite those generals and politician must have in order to be celebrated for generations to come - good luck. His bad luck was monumental.” (Back translation)
Crozier's verdict is too casual. Chiang worked tenaciously for decades and it was never just about luck.
He spent his entire life trying to exterminate the Communists. In the 10-year-long Civil War (1927-1937), he believed he could do it in “two weeks,” but that war lasted 10 years. After World War II, he thought he could accomplish the mission in “three months.”In Taiwan, he planned to “use a year to prepare, two to fight the way back to the mainland, three to launch a sweeping assault and, ultimately, five years to finish the job.” He lived and died in his dream that one day he could quench the wild fire sparked by communism.
Why could the Red power in China survive all the enmity and hardship?
Why could the Red power in China manage to grow so fast in a country ruled by White Terror?
Why could the Red power in China succeed splendidly despite domestic and foreign harassment?
Chiang came up with five reasons, but none of them was correct. Crozier sums it up as Chiang's “bad luck.” He did not get it right either.
The only one to answer these questions was Mao Zedong.
He gave the answer as early as 1928.
On October 5 that year, Mao wrote a pamphlet Why Is It That Red Political Power Can Exist in China? Section 2 was “Reasons for the Emergence and Survival of Red Political Power in China.”
Mao also gave five reasons. First: “War within the White regime”; in other words, the warlords.
“Never before in the world has a country witnessed pockets of Red power surviving for a sustained period of time while surrounded by the White regime,” he wrote. “There are some special reasons for this peculiar phenomenon, and its continued existence requires some equally special conditions.” What are the conditions? First: “Such a phenomenon is to be found in none of the imperialist countries nor for that matter in any colony under direct imperialist rule, but only in a country like China which is under indirect imperialist rule. And without fail, this peculiar phenomenon will meet with another oddity, namely wars between the White regimes.”
Of the five reasons Chiang proposed, he saw “the evil plan of the Red imperialists” as fundamental.
Of the five reasons Mao proposed, “wars between the White regimes” was the fundamental one.
Mao's insight came from his in-depth understanding of the land beneath his feet.
Chiang presided over the most ruthless White Terror in China.
Yet Mao found the most welcoming territory for the Chinese Communists to grow amidst Chiang's rule of terror and the perpetual wars between the White regimes.
The new territory not only kept enemies at bay but also provided independence from friends.
The Red bases and agrarian revolutionary regimes that dotted rural China helped the Chinese Communists forge their own political philosophy and create their own armed forces. Economically, the Chinese Communists were no longer totally reliant on the Comintern. “Crush the landlords and redistribute their land” was more than the basis of political mobilization: It was also how the CPC secured its financial independence.
The communist martyrs, who gave their lives for their political beliefs, have been widely celebrated for their courage and commitment. Much less celebrated is the fact that the Soviet bases in rural China sent shipments of gold to the CPC Central Committee in Shanghai.
One phenomenon peculiar to the Chinese revolution is that the Red leadership was first established in the developed and modern Shanghai, but the Red power was eventually founded in backward, impoverished communities deep in the mountains.
Without having been established first in China's most developed modern city, the CPC would not have acquired the system of progressive ideas, nor would it have been able to draw so many talented people to form its leadership. Without dispersing into the most deprived rural areas, the Red power would not have secured its sources of funds and soldiers, and the CPC would have lost its foothold in China.
Without its own army and power bases, without creating its own strongholds and opening up their own sources of funds, China's Communists could not have altered their dependent relationship with the Comintern and the Soviet Union.
If they had not followed Mao's way of taking rural communities first so as to surround the cities, the Chinese revolution would not have achieved independence from its enemies, nor would it have achieved independence from its friends.
In 1949, after announcing the foundation of the People's Republic of China, Mao visited Stalin in Moscow. Mao surprised all with his first words to Stalin: “I've been under attack for so long, but had no one to complain to.” “Victors are above blame,” replied Stalin. Faced with the triumph of the Chinese revolution, the man of steel who changed world politics of the 20th century openly accepted that actual practice is the sole criterion for judging truth. Which points to the preciousness of Mao's Zedong's way.