Labor and the Chinese Revolution

Front matter

CLASS STRATEGIES AND CONTRADICTIONS OF CHINESE COMMUNISM, 1928-1948

KENNETH G. LIEBERTHAL AND RICHARD H.

ROGEL CENTER FOR CHINESE STUDIES

Contents

Acknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction

A Peasant War Led by the Proletariat: The Class Line for the Post-1927 Soviet Era

The Quest for a Revolutionary Upsurge: Urban Labor and the CCP, 1928-35

Introduction

The two decade period from 1928 through 1948 witnessed a remarkable reversal of fortune for the Chinese Communist revolutionary movement. It began in the wake of the enforced retreat of the shattered Communist remnants from the countryside and ended with the final triumphant return to those cities by the Communist-led peasant forces of the People's Liberation Army (PLA). The once powerful left labor movement of the mid-1920s had suffered an all but fatal blow in the succession of disasters that befell the CCP in the 1927 dissolution of the first KMT-CCP united front. But though the Communist-led labor movement never recovered its former momentum and influence during the subsequent twenty years of revolutionary struggle, the party's assessment and handling of labor's role in the revolution remained an important and often crucial ingredient in CCP doctrinal, strategic, and policy formulations in those years, as well as in the leadership conflicts which developed from these formulations.

The above issues and conflicts were evident in the agrarian revolutionary line of the party, in its rural-urban strategic concepts and class policies, in united front issues, in questions of revolutionary stages and class leadership, and in the economie and developmental policies pursued in Communist-controlled areas. The role assigned to labor continued to be a critical touchstone, whether in the efforts to accentuate and reinforce the party's proletarian base and character in the decade following 1928 or, conversely, in the moves during the subsequent ten years to forge new policies and strategies which in effect restructured and redefined the class contours of Chinese Communism. One may indeed question whether labor's "narrow" class interests were compatible with those of a peasant~based social revolution or with the developmental needs of the massive and poverty-stricken rural society that was China.

The proletarian themes and issues underlying the party's ideological utterances were shrouded in rhetoric designed, perhaps, as much to disguise as to chart actual class strategies. Rhetoric notwithstanding, a careful analysis of such pronouncements is vitally important in following and evaluating the party's changing lines during this key revolutionary period. The function of the "proletariat" in the complex of policy issues and leadership struggles which developed under the precarious circumstances of those years had an importance out of all proportion to labor's relatively minor role in the post-1927 Communist-led revolution. This may be noted, for example, both in Maoist criticism of the urban and proletarian bias of the Comintern-sponsored (Internationalist) leadership wing of the CCP in the 1930s for its dogmatic misunderstanding of the rural-peasant realities of the Chinese revolution! and in Soviet Russian analyses which view the Chinese party's long-term isolation from proletarian centers before 1949 as the root cause of the party's "agrarianization" and the social basis of "petty bourgeois" Maoist nationalism. ?

In the early, primarily urban-based phase of its existence, the CCP gave top priority to organizing and leading a mass labor movement and to mounting labor struggles built around both economie and political issues. The Communist-led All-China Federation of Labor (ACFL), formally organized in 1925, claimed to represent some 2.8 million workers at its Fourth National Labor Congress in June 1927, though this high-water mark was even then eroding rapidly under the relentless and ruthless suppression of the left labor movement in much of China.”

It was during 1927 that the CCP-led labor movement reached both its zenith of strength and influence and its nadir of defeat, destruction, and demoralization. This shift in fortunes is largely the tale of three cities: Shanghai, Hankow (Wuhan), and Canton. The

Communist-organized Shanghai general strike and workers' uprising in March 1927, on the eve of Chiang Kai-shek's entry into the city, was followed by Chiang's coup of 12 April against the left, which effectively liquidated the red labor movement in China's leading industrial center. The high tide of the Hankow-based labor movement was in evidence at the Fourth ACFL Congress held there in June, but was quickly dissipated with left-wing KMT leader Wang Ching-wei's split with and suppression of the Communists soon thereafter. And finally, the party's powerful Canton labor organization, which had functioned during the famous Canton-Hong Kong strike of 1925-26 as a de facto second government in that originating center of the Nationalist revolution, £ was destroyed in the aftermath of the ill-fated Canton uprising of December 1927, the party's last desperate effort to reverse the counterrevolutionary tide.” In the bleak aftermath of these developments a May 1928 internal notice of the Party Center on the labor movement acknowledged that "the Red labor organizations of the working elass across the country have been smashed to pieces [so] that it is impossible to restore them immediately."®

Under these unpromising circumstances, the Party Center, now underground, continued to operate primarily from Shanghai until late 1932 or early 1933. It sought to retain and expand its links with the urban labor movement by organizing surviving left elements into secret red trade unions and by trying to counter the growing role of the legal, KMT-controlled ("yellow") unions. The ongoing KMT "white terror" against the Communist underground in the cities effectively impeded the progress of the sectarian red labor movement. According to Communist sources, the Fifth ACFL Congress of the red trade unions, meeting secretly in Shanghai in late 1929, represented only some sixty-five thousand workers, three-fifths of whom were located in the rural soviet areas.’ In a September 1930 report to the Third Plenum of the CCP Central Committee, Chou En-lai acknowledged that industrial workers numbered little more than two thousand in a party which had by then grown to one hundred twenty thousand members.® By 1932, the Central Council of the Moscow-based Red International of Labor Unions (RILU, or Profintern) conceded that the red trade unions in the nonsoviet areas were "extremely weak" and lagged far behind "the growing militancy and struggle of the masses."9 Despite efforts after 1931 to promote a "strike-struggle" movement focused on countering Japanese imperialism, the constantly reiterated Communist projections of an impending new urban revolutionary upsurge which would reinforce, coordinate, and ultimately lead the rural movement remained unrealized as the post-1927 soviet era moved to a close with the Long March of 1934-35.

However, the revolution did regain vitality after 1927 in seattered rural areas of south central China by means of a strategy that incorporated armed struggle, agrarian revolution, and the organization of soviets. The Communist task now was to fulfill the antifeudal (agrarian) and antiimperialist (nationalist) goals of the aborted "bourgeois-democratic" revolution, which would, in turn, provide the foundation for a final revolutionary transition to socialism and proletarian dictatorship. The political and strategic guidelines for this new phase of the struggle were outlined by the Sixth CCP Congress, held in Moscow during the summer of 1928, and were summed up in the oft-repeated phrase, "a peasant war led by the proletariat." The urban component of this line was the effort to revive Communist influence in the urban labor movement so that the cities could once again become active arenas in a rising revolutionary tide. This strategy was espoused most forcefully from January 1931 on by the youthful, Russian-returned student leadership of the party and was implemented on this faction's authority in the Chinese Soviet Republic, which was established in the Kiangsi- Fukien central soviet area in November 1931. The party sought to proletarianize soviet area party, army, and government organs with a view to giving local labor a favored economic and political status, raising proletarian consciousness through anticapitalist struggle, and promoting "class" trade unions as "the pillar of soviet power." These unions were to assume a leadership role over the poorer elements of the peasantry and to forge closer links with them. They were to function as struggle instruments for accentuating and advancing the elass interests of both agricultural and nonagricultural workers at the expense of the "rural bourgeoisie’ (rich peasants and capitalists). 19

Mao's policy-making role as chairman of the Kiangsi-based soviet republic after 1931 remains ambiguous. But it appears evident that his efforts to foster a broader base of support among the peasantry and to focus on economic construction issues operated within the overall constraints of the class strategies formulated by the Comintern and the CCP leaderships. Moreover, while the mobilization techniques promoted by Mao in Kiangsi provided models and experiences for the later Yenan years,” it was only in the latter period that the new class strategies and content of the Maoist mass line fully unfolded.

Just as the urban proletarian component of the party's strategy remained frustrated during the 1928-35 soviet period, so, too, did the effort to promote more directly proletarian leadership in the rural revolution founder on an unreal assessment of the significance of both proletarian and capitalist forces in the Chinese countryside and on the inevitable difficulties and contradictions that such class war policies encountered under conditions of a protracted, isolated, and increasingly beleaguered peasant-based struggle for survival.

Problems of class line remained largely unresolved as the Kiangsi base was abandoned in late 1934. However, new possibilities for a KMT-CCP national anti-Japanese united front after 1935 seemed once again to open opportunities for the CCP to return to and revive its urban labor roots. The advocates of this new united-front proletarian line focused their efforts on rebuilding and fortifying the party's links to a national labor movement centered principally in the cities, which would serve as the key Communist political bases under the overall "bourgeois" leadership of the KMT in the national resistance war against Japan. The influence of this line was felt also in the northern Shensi Communist base, which the decimated Long March forces had reached in late 1935 and which became the Shensi-Kansu-Ninghsia (Shen-Kan-Ning) Border Region (the famed Yenan) in 1937 under the new united front arrangements with the KMT. This was evident in the policy trend (to about 1940- 41) which gave priority to the development of a necessarily modest state-sponsored and advantaged industrial and proletarian nucleus in the Border Region.

This policy line, which was identified with the Moscoworiented faction of the CCP led by Wang Ming (Ch'en Shao-yii), was by no means an urban revolutionary strategy as opposed to a Maoist rural revolutionary strategy. 1? It was rather an abandonment (for at least the duration of the war) of a Communist-led revolution, urban or rural, in favor of a collaborative joint bloc against Japan, in which the "proletariat," linked to its Communist vanguard and retaining its class identity, would subordinate itself to the leadership of the national government for the "bourgeois nationalist" resistance war. But, again, these proletariat-oriented policies contained intrinsic difficulties and contradictory aspects, and the actual course of military and political developments in the early war years seriously undermined this line and led to the political eclipse of its Internationalist proponents within the party.

Although Mao had been in a leading (though not commanding) position in the CCP since 1935, a Maoist line did not fully emerge until the eve of the Mao-initiated party rectification movement (cheng-feng) of the early 1940s, a movement which brought an end to the remaining political power of the Wang Ming group. In contrast to the latter's wartime program, Mao stressed overwhelmingly the CCP's primary commitment to the rural base areas. He advanced a broad range of rural-oriented, populist (mass line) policies in which the previously advantaged status of the Border Region's nascent state industrial sector and its managerial, union, and worker constituencies was downgraded. The party at the same time accelerated its mobilization of the peasantry, increased its pressure on the landlords, and moved more forcefully to affirm an independent Communist role in the resistance war based on its expanding base areas and peasant armies. These strategies were expressed politically in the party's assertion of direct and long-term leadership over a new-democratic coalition of classes in which both labor and capital were constituent, but subordinated, elements. Thus, as the Maoist leadership moved toward fuller and broader mobilization of the peasantry (its major constituency) on an antifeudal basis, it proclaimed a mutual-benefits theme for labor and capital which sidestepped the issue of worker (farm and industry) mobilization through class interest appeals or policies. At the same time, a "lie low" strategy for the urban centers under KMT or Japanese control concentrated on a broad political approach to a multiclass bloe in which "narrow" labor class interests and struggles were played down.

The civil war years after 1945 brought a more radical revolutionary CCP line and a more intricate interplay of interests and forces as the Communists moved more directly and massively into the national political arena. New responsibility for running the economies of Communist-occupied urban centers and direct contact with larger labor constituencies led to more complex wage policies and to some resurgence of proletarian-line attitudes and policies among party cadres. Yet the fundamental outlines of the conciliatory Maoist labor-capital strategy predominated as the rural peasant revolution escalated and, indeed, were strongly reiterated as the party prepared to enter the cities in 1948.

In dealing with the policy issues and policy variations in Chinese Communism over these two decades of war and revolution, it would be overly simplistic to juxtapose an urban to a rural revolutionary strategy as continuous and discrete entities. The urban labor standpoint had its significant rural concomitant, and the rural peasant line had its important urban counterpart as well. Each of the various urban-rural approaches had its specifie class content and strategy. The ultimately successful Maoist strategy no longer found it necessary to view the cities as crucial revolutionary struggle centers which could generate the reliable proletarian base needed to ensure final revolutionary victory and the socialist future of the revolution. To the contrary, Mao was able to fashion a CCP-led united front strategy which not only facilitated peasant mobilization and revolutionization in a protracted rural resistance struggle, but also provided the party with its first really viable urban political strategy as well. By no longer linking the party's urban base and destiny primarily with labor, Mao succeeded in shaping a broadly based urban approach in which the cities became passive but increasingly receptive and still crucial targets as the rural revolution moved on to final victory in the 1946-48 civil war period.

The Sixth CCP Congress in 1928 had seen the proletarianization of the agrarian revolution as a necessary step toward the ultimate creation of a "workers' government" which would "inaugurate a collective-village economy under the leadership of large state-owned urban industries" and which would unite (through cooperatives) "the rural economy of several hundreds of millions of peasants with the urban socialist industrial economy." 13 In the actual event, the massive Chinese agrarian revolution, though successfully led by a Communist Party committed to socialist goals, was not and could not be kept within the proletarian parameters set by the 1928 program. The prerequisites for the kind of "workers! government" projected at that time had not been fulfilled. A primary commitment to an organized and "class-conscious" proletariat militantly defending and advancing its class interests proved unsuited (in both Communist-controlled and Nationalist-ruled areas) to the basic interests and necessary class strategies of the ultimately successful Chinese revolution. And the appropriate role and status of industrial labor in postliberation China, relative to other class forces and to overall developmental priorities and goals, have continued to be a source of political controversy and conflicting policies. The latter point will be briefly addressed in the conclusion to this study.