CHAPTER 7: WHOSE IDENTITY, WHOSE CONSTRUCTS AND WHOSE INTEREST? THE SYNTHESIS OF PRIMARY AND SECONDARY DATA IN
4.3 The Chinese Communist Party
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These and many other factors created a justification for a more far-reaching revolution. It has been argued that the 1911 revolution was elitist in its manner, mainly led by merchants and military members of the Qing court who had been hired by the dynasty in a last-ditch effort to modernize the army to retain power but had defected to the side of the revolutionaries (see Lynch 2004:29). In terms of humiliation at the hand of foreign forces, like the 1895 defeat of the Qing Dynasty by Japan (Fenby 2011; Wang 2014) (and the subsequent takeover of Manchuria), the suzerainty that the United Kingdom exercised on certain of its territories, and the failure of the post-1911 regimes to hold China as a unified whole coalesced into an intolerable atmosphere for some Chinese. Those who argue with the advantage of hindsight usually refer to China’s history at the hands of foreign domination as the most influential factor in its foreign policy to date.
From Asia, Japan continued harassing the Republic of China, culminating in the war between the two countries from 1937 to the eventual defeat of Japan in 1945 (see Johnstone 1998; Tzu-chin 2016) as the Second World War drew to a close.
The protestations that China continues to make, with significant support from Africa, against foreign censure and interference, has often been viewed from this antipathy to foreign domination.31 Another feature that makes China and Africa argue from the same standpoint is the Chinese rhetoric against capitalism, an ideology which much of Africa and China used to erroneously link with imperialism. The influence of the Chinese Communist Party has been very notable in this attitude. It is noteworthy that most influential members, if not all, who formed the CCP were members or adherents of the GMD and the two organizations formed a formal alliance. Thus during the nascent years of the CCP an intersection of membership existed with the GMD.
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a country and were both revolutionary organizations. The nascent CCP needed the army of the GMD for it to have any chance of a successful struggle in casting off imperialism (Schram 2002). Furthermore, the Communist International, known more popularly as the Comintern,32 which exercised some influence at the inception of the CCP, favoured a coalition with the GMD.
Mao Zedong, who is undoubtedly the most influential architect of Chinese communism, served as a member “of the Shanghai Executive Bureau of the Kuomintang (sic)” (Schram 2002:283) from about 1923 to 1924.
Expectedly, right from the formation of the CCP, a section of the communists were against the CCPs’ alliance with the GMD.33 Mao is one of the members who upbraided the communists who were against the CCP-GMD alliance at the CCP’s Third Congress in 1923 (Lynch 2004). The fissures that eventually deepened between the two organizations were partly because the communists had grown disenchanted with the GMD’s failure to stop Chinese subjugation to Japan and the West, and the failure to hold the country together through turbulent episodes like warlordism. Chiang Kai-shek, the eventual leader of the GMD, capitulated to Japan when the latter took over Manchuria. This further disillusioned the communists who loathed Japanese occupation.34
At the time that the CCP was finding its ground, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was the most influential communist organization and, inevitably, a model on which Chinese communists could build their organization. As Schwartz (2002:137) points out “from the very outset, the Leninist theory of imperialism and its image of the Western world was to win wide
32 The Comintern was an organization primarily of Soviet origin, formed in 1919, to secure interests of the Soviet Union in the international system. The main fashion through which this was sought was the promotion and exportation of revolutions. For a long time the CCP remained a follower of the Comintern and, during the first few years of CCP rule, Mao still considered the Soviet Union the “teacher” of international communism.
33 The highhanded means with which Chiang Kai-shek subsequently tried to suppress the communists point to the possibility that he had always harboured a scepticism if not utter resentment for the communists. Apart from their voiced hostility towards the imperialists and the influence of the Comintern, the CCP and GMD had little else that held them together with the passage of time.
34 Prior to the capitulation to Japan which happened in 1931 (Tzu-chin 1927), in 1927 Chiang Kai-shek ordered what became known as the White Terror when his subjects hunted down and killed thousands of communists and members of the GMD who were thought to have leftist inclinations. His rampage was lauded by business men and foreign nationals. That the rampage started in Shanghai was a telling detail: it was in Shanghai that the communists were putting up a strong trade union movement. As expected, the business men who cheered the White Terror did so because they did not want an influential trade union movement to circumscribe their latitude over their workers (Lynch 2004). This period was against the most intimate of communist ambitions – the protection of the workers and, in China, the peasants.
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acceptance not only among those close to the Communist Party but even among the Kuomintang-affiliated individuals and politicians.” While the general understanding is that the Chinese Communist Party subordinated itself to Soviet communism, it also sought to assert itself as somewhat independent of the Soviet version of communism because China was faced with particular circumstances that the Soviet Union did not share. In “Problems of Strategy in Guerilla War” (1938) Mao belaboured the fact that China had unique circumstances which could not be coped with by a wholesale importation of the Soviet style of communism. While he conceded that the Soviet experience had some valuable insights, he urged his fellow communists to “value even more the experience of China’s revolutionary war, because there [were] many factors specific to the Chinese revolution” (Mao 1938:79). This attitude was to take on the character of a direct challenge to Soviet leadership of international communism after the CCP assumed power and Nikita Khrushchev succeeded Stalin as leader of the Soviet Union.
By its nature, the CCP had at least two objects to struggle against: the first was to end what could be termed as Japanese imperialism (Mao 1965; Sullivan 1979), and the second was to fight for the peasants who made up the biggest section of the population of China. For these two preoccupations to be carried out effectively, strong leadership and political expediency35 were needed and this meant the accretion of absolute power in an individual or a high ranking body of the party. In the case of the CCP, Mao, through his thought, was the authority of what the CCP could pursue. This was not a unique case of the CCP. As mentioned in the third chapter, individuals can acquire adequate power that can actually shape the course of a country. Lynch (2004:126) asserts that twentieth century “Marxist leaders gave an indelibly personal character to the communist systems they created.” Mao was inured to violence as the means of gaining political power or achieving revolutionary ideals. Thus, the CCP had to yield to Mao’s insistence on violence as a process through which non-communist forces and imperialists could be replaced with communism. His insistence on gaining political power through “the barrel of the gun” (Mao 1938; see Onate 1978 and Kasrils 2004) was often used to present communist China as a bellicose and violent country.
35 The Communists and nationalists were intermittently brought together to fight against Japanese aggression.
With time and the increase of influence of the CCP, maintaining this expedient alliance became increasingly difficult. From about 1938, the struggle against Japan was coupled with an effective civil war between the nationalists and the communists.
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Both the communists and the nationalists in China had arguable reasons to resort to violence in their struggle against Japan and each other. Both shared the feeling of isolation when Western powers especially seemed to dither on whether or not to intervene and end Japanese aggression in China. However, in a speech given in 1935, Mao asserted that while the peasants, workers and petty bourgeoisie were proactive in promoting revolution and stemming the tide of on-coming Japanese imperialism, the Kuomintang, local gentry and landlords, had long decided “that revolution of whatever kind was worse that imperialism” (Mao 1965:155). China started receiving more attention after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour which drew the United States into the Second World War. However, even the attention that China received after that incident was not much and led the Chinese to reckon that what they ultimately achieved against Japan was out of their own efforts with negligible assistance from the West. The reasoning that China was isolated from the West continued even after the communists took over. Furthermore, the Japanese refusal, to this day, to apologize for its imperial past and occupation of China still stymies mutual trust between the two countries (Johnstone 1998; Christensen 1999; see also Burkman 2014). The identity that China sought to affect was that of a power that was isolated by other powers who it accused of supporting imperialism or at least doing little to stop it. The material and theoretical help that communist China offered to colonized Africa could also be traced to this attitude. Furthermore, that the West continued to recognize Chiang Kai-shek as the de jure representative of China further hardened the communists’ stance against Western powers.