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Revolution and Counter-Revolution in China Author(s): J. K. Fairbank Source: Pacific Affairs, Vol. 22, No. 3 (Sep., 1949), pp. 278-282 Published by: Pacific Affairs, University of British Columbia Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2751801 Accessed: 22-04-2018 20:59 UTC

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REVIEW ARTICLES

Revolution and Counter-Revolution in China

THE failure of Russian policy in China in I926-27, even with the help of a Marxist theory of revolution, was almost as complete as the American policy failure in i946-47, without any theory of revolution. Today the first task is to understand the revolutionary process in China, for the American failure has been one of understanding rather than of action. Current pro- posals for American action offer little or no rationale of the social process among Asia's peasant masses; it is easier to concentrate on the geopolitics and logistics of American strategy there. The strategy of power politics in Asia, however, is subordinate to the strategy of peasant revolution, which in turn is dependent upon the revolutionist's idea of the social process.

Few leaders in great social upheavals have had a clear foresight of what actually eventuated. But the Marxist's famous claim, that he can foresee future history, puts Western social science on its mettle. Since Americans who cannot surpass the Marxist understanding of China can hardly expect a bright Sino-American future, a firsthand Marxist analysis of the Commin- tern fiasco of I927 is of timely interest.

Manabendra Nath Roy, an Indian, was a Comintern agent in China in the crucial first half of I927. His book' was first published in German in 1930 (480 pp.) and has been amplified in an English edition of I946, evidently without much effort to take account of the intervening decades of Marxist thought in China. It is an eloquent, prolix, ex-cathedra work, which loftily passes in review the whole course of the Chinese revolution since i850 and presents the author's own unorthodox and anti-Stalinist Marx- ist analysis of it. This analysis has the negative value of exposing the lacunae and non-sequiturs of a doctrinaire and a-priori approach to history. It also has positive value, in its chapters on the period of Roy's participation in the Wuhan government of I927, because here his own Marxist dogma is closely interwoven with firsthand experience: the two are in fact fused in a trenchant, if not always convincing, analysis of revolutionary dynamics.

The first half of Roy's 672 pages concerns an historical record with which he is not too familiar, so that his Marxism has every opportunity to produce dogmatic conclusions. "Marxian sinology", he says, has a great opportunity to improve upon bourgeois sinology, which has become "a sterile controversy

1 REVOLUTION AND COUNTER-REVOLUTION IN CHINA. By M. N. Roy. Calcutta: Renaissance Publishers. 1946. 689 pp. Rs.15.

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Revolution and Counter-Revolution in China

among pedants". In making these improvements he begins by denying the existence of a "uniform type of Asiatic mode of production antecedent to the antique". Asiatic society was only a parallel type of social order in the ancient world, "bound to attain the next higher stage-Feudalism.... Other- wise, the monistic principle of Historic Materialism would be disproved, and the Marxian perspective of history, that Communism is the common destiny of the human race, would be untenable." This reasoning and some quotations from Marx prove that China has been essentially feudal, and the author is therefore free to apply the usual Marxist categories to the mod- ern Chinese scene. In application, however, these categories seem curiously to reflect the deathless impact of the Great French Revolution, more than any events or realities in Asiatic history.

Thus Roy finds that the "Taiping Revolt represented the entrance of China into the period of the bourgeois democratic revolution", which is "an unavoid- able stage of social progress" through which all mankin'd must pass. The Taiping leaders "were the typical fore-runners of the modern bourgeoisie". "Historically, the Taiping Rebellion in China was as much a bourgeois democratic movement as the Great French Revolution." "It is crystal clear to any unprejudiced student of history that foreign intervention was solely responsible for the defeat of the revolution." All this is quite contrary to the general opinion of historians.

Continuing this pageant of Chinese history in Western dress, Roy finds that the Reform Movement of i898 was the first effort of the bourgeoisie to take power from the corrupt "feudal aristocracy". K'ang Yu-wei was "the Chinese encyclopedist . . . with all the specific characteristics of the philos- ophers of the bourgeois revolution in Europe". Sun was his "spiritual dis- ciple". The Reformers sought an alliance between monarchy and bour- geoisie, just as in Bourbon France.

The second stage of the bourgeois democratic revolution in China was

the Boxer Uprising, "a revolutionary popular movement" against the al- liance of foreign imperialism and native reaction. Unfortunately the bour- geoisie failed to join it.

In i9ii the bourgeoisie tried to set up the Republic in alliance with "the less reactionary section of the feudal nobility and officialdom . . . not with the help of the revolutionary masses". The proletariat was too immature. The Chinese bourgeoisie wanted power but feared revolution, so Sun sur- rendered to Yuan Shih-k'ai.

At this point Mr. Roy shifts from his rather procrustean schematization of modern China as eighteenth-century France to a brilliantly polemical hundred-page maceration of Sun Yat-sen. He says that he first met Sun in 19X6 and that "the criticism of his earlier social and political views is largely based upon personal acquaintance". At any rate, Roy has a low view of

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Pacific Aijairs

Sun's qualities. Sun denied the class struggle. His was the ideology of the petty bourgeoisie. He was a conspirator, isolated from the masses, seeking formulae of compromise, a reformer without inspiring vision. Sun did not think; he only schemed. He believed in Confucianism, paternalism, trus- teeship for the people, benevolent despotism. The revolutionary movement

of i9iI was "intellectually sterile, politically naive, theoretically bankrupt and ideologically reactionary". Having its roots in none of the principal classes of society, it was utterly devoid of a social outlook and took foreign imperialism for its friend. Sun's program for the international development of China with foreign capital would have meant complete colonization. Only at the end did Sun make "a praiseworthy effort to come out of the dreary wilderness of illusion in which he had wasted the best part of his life".

More specifically, Roy contends that Sun's Principle of Nationalism was actually "people's clanism"; it was not based on individualism and so was really a forerunner of fascism. His Principle of Democracy or "people's sovereignty" likewise did not imply freedom of the individual. The essence of those first two Principles was really class domination. The five Yuan in Sun's five-power government were not organs of the state but mere government departments, a monstrous, top-heavy, feudal-bureaucratic machinery lacking organic connection with the people.

Many of these strictures would be accepted by Western critics of Sun Yat-sen. Yet neither they nor Mr. Roy can easily point to another Chinese leader before 1925 who offered more than Sun. This ideological weakness in China's pre-Marxist revolution calls for a more reasoned explanation than Mr. Roy's Marxism provides-possibly a cultural explanation.

THE MORE SIGNIFICANT part of this thick volume is of course its dissection

of the Communist failure in 1927. The tragedy, as Roy sees it, was that the Communists let themselves be deceived by the radicalism of the petty bour- geois nationalists like Wang Ching-wei, and failed to push through the essential and inevitable bourgeois democratic revolution. He gives a long list of Comintern and Chinese Communist errors: the Chinese Communist Party became so devoted to the concept of the united front that it failed to champion the peasants' demand for land redistribution, or to arm the peasant unions, or to organize among the troops, holding back each time in order not to break with its supposed allies, the left Kuomintang. Similarly, the Communist movement fell for the theory of its leader, Ch'en Tu-hsiu, that the revolution must be "broadened" territorially by attacking the war- lords before it was "deepened" socially by intensifying the class struggle. In fact, however, the Northern Expedition of 1926 was launched from Can- ton, says Roy, primarily to relieve internal tension over the issue of social revolution. Similarly, the abortive Second Northern Expedition from Wuhan

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Revolution and Counter-Revolution in China

toward Peking in 1927 was a ruse to avoid the issue. In both cases the Kuo- mintang bourgeoisie was allied with "left militarism", the warlords who joined the revolution to profit by it before suppressing it. Throughout, the Communists, as specialists in the organization of mass peasant support, should have worked to carry through the revolution on the land and to consolidate this support. But until August 1927 they held back in order not to break with the left Kuomintang, and then it was too late.

Roy's chief contention is that the Communist strategy in 1926-28 failed

in its timing. In November i926 the Comintern had decided that the Chinese revolution must thenceforth be developed as an agrarian revolution. But the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party, as well as the Comintern representatives in China, "were of a different view" and -still urged unity with the nationalist bourgeoisie instead of accentuated class struggle.

"I was alone to advocate the different point of view that the Chinese Revo- lution had reached a critical moment in which it must strike out a new course and a fetish should not be made of the alliance with the Kuo Min Tang. The Executive of the C[ommunist] I[nternational] adopted my point of view, which was opposed in the beginning by Stalin himself. But Stalin was brought around to my view and the Thesis adopted by the E.C.C.I. was drafted by me. Immediately afterwards, I left for China as the head of a new delegation of the C.I. Soon after my arrival there, the Fifth Congress of the C.P. of China met at Hankow in May 1927. The leadership of the C.P. were opposed to the new directions of the C. I. But I persuaded the Fifth Congress to endorse the new line in spite of the opposition of practically all the leaders of the party" (p. 538).

Nevertheless, Roy was unable to win the Chinese Communist Party away from its opportunist dependence on the left Kuomintang until after Chiang Kai-shek, T'ang Sheng-chih, and other militarists on the right and left had broken the back of the workers' and peasants' movement. When the

Chinese Communist Party went over, in August 19g27, to a belated revolu- tionary offensive, it was too late. The mass movement had already been demoralized by the white terror. The Communist revolts at Swatow (Sep- tember) and Canton (December), engineered under the instructions of a new Comintern delegate, Lominadze (Roy having resigned in July), were "reckless adventurism, which led to the complete destruction of the forces of revolution . . . after criminal opportunism had permitted the most favor- able opportunity for striking to pass by". Borodin was "the preceptor of the policy which killed the Chinese Revolution", but the real murderer was the Comintern itself.

What errors appear in Roy's picture of the Comintern's errors? Are his phases of Chinese history and his classes in Chinese society true to fact?

The dictum that Chinese society has been feudal and must have its bour- geois democratic revolution before proceeding to socialism is, of course,

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Pacific Affairs

Europocentric-here is an Indian applying to China the categories which Russians have derived from a German who, like all of his generation, was under the shadow of the French Revolution. It is at least equally satisfactory to assign China to the Oriental type of bureaucratized agrarian society pic- tured by Wittfogel and others. Then the Taipings of i850-64 and the Re- formers of i898 need not be so bourgeois, nor the warlordism of the I920S so anomalous. Similarly, the Communist Party in China need not be left unclassified, sometimes confused with the masses and sometimes confessed to be an elite. Wang Ching-wei need not be "a petty bourgeois radical na- tionalist", but only an opportunist. The failure of the Nanking Government "bourgeoisie" to use the peasantry for the defeat of feudal-militarism need not be so remarkable. In short, the whole exercise of applying Marxist pat- terns dogmatically to Chinese society, and then being appalled at the in- adequacies of revolutionary performance in China, is footless without a more concrete study of Chinese social processes. But if Revolution and Counter- Revolution in China errs on the side of dogmatism, it also obliges Western specialists to bring forth more convincing analyses of the Chinese revolu- tion, more sound factually, yet theoretically as broad.

Cambridge, Massachusetts, June 1949 J. K. FAIRBANK

China: The Land and the People

THE reviewer may say at the outset that he has greatly appreciated the op- portunity given him of studying Dr. Winfield's book, 1 since he was a war- time colleague of the author's in government work at Chungking, and only regretted that the exigencies of service did not permit a closer acquaintance to develop. Dr. Winfield's work for the welfare of the Chinese people is well known to the scientific circles concerned. If this book should reach a much wider audience, it would, in the reviewer's opinion, be all to the good, for he has found relatively little to disagree with in Dr. Winfield's presen- tation of the problems, and much to applaud.

The book may be said to be written around a certain focal point (p. 256), namely, the problem of developing (and, more difficult still, persuading the Chinese farmer to use, or providing him with the economic possibilities of using) composting methods of such a kind as will be guaranteed to kill those innumerable, lethal, disease-carrying organisms which are broadcast owing to the (chemically very commendable) practice, long universal in Chinese agriculture and horticulture, of using human excreta for manure.

'CHINA: THE LAND AND THE PEOPLE. By Gerald F. Winfield. New York: Sloane. 1948.

437 pP. illus. $5-

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