How Mao conquered China: Workers' Liberty 3/24

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• Foreword
• Introduction
• Chronology
• 1. The symbiosis of reaction
• 2. Two Chiangs on the skids
• 3. The “secret” of Communist success
• 4. Blind alley in Nanking
• 5. The rats begin to desert
• 6. The Communists confront the cities
• 7. Revolution in a straitjacket
• 8. Mao and neo-Stalinism: the path of the Chinese CP
• 9. Peking versus Moscow: the case of Anna Louise Strong, part 1
• 10. Whose spy is who? The Anna Louise Strong case, part 2
• 11. What is Chinese Stalinism? Notes on the new state party
• 12. The bureaucratic revolution rolls on
• 13. The integration of

“The Chinese Communist Revolution was the greatest event of the 20th century after the October 1917 Russian Revolution.”

Statements like that were for decades common on the Trotskyist left.

Even among those of us who believed that a new working-class “political revolution” was necessary against the Stalinist regime established over all of mainland China in 1949.

The Chinese revolution was seen as a giant step forward, albeit in a twisted and deformed way, in an ongoing world revolution against capitalism. With China, fully one third of the land mass of the globe was under Stalinist control —

Original introduction to the 1970 edition

The articles that follow were written and published while the events themselves were still unfolding, during the crucial 1948–9 period when the Maoist party was still conquering China. Without benefit of 20–20 hindsight, without benefit of documents and research that became available only afterward, Jack Brad called all the shots.

Their contemporaneity gives these articles a sense of immediacy and vividness which historical contemplation cannot provide. But that alone would not be enough reason to publish them in 1970. The point is that, after two

1909–12: democratic upheaval. Abdication of the last Emperor, formation of the Guomindang (1912), followed by a period dominated by the rule of regional warlords.

1919: May 4th Movement — student protests at Japan’s acquisition of German rights in China under the Versailles Treaty.

1920: Formation of Chinese Communist Party.

1924: Communist Party (under pressure from Stalin and his friends in Moscow) joins Guomindang. USSR sends military advisers to help Guomindang.

1927: Guomindang, led by Chiang Kai Shek, seizes Shanghai and massacres Communist workers there. In December 1927 CP attempts an

The governmental crisis is unresolved. The Kuomintang remains the dictatorial ruler of nationalist China.

Its armies, its secret police, its bureaucracy, its gangster-run labour front, its economic enterprises are the state structure. It has been unable to spread its support to include other groups. It remains a corrupt police regime, exploiting all classes, employing terror and, vampire-like, sucking the maximum loot out of the people and the economy.

Its base is its military and police power. It does not enjoy the confidence of the banking, industrial, or commercial groups. The Kuomintang

The fall of Tsinan, capital of Shantung Province in Northern China, brings to a head the military crisis of the Kuomintang government of Chiang Kai-shek.

Economic gloom deepens into chronic disaster. Production continues to decline while the rapacious KMT bureaucracy continues to suck the lifeblood out of trade and industry. Meanwhile the $400 million American aid is dissipated in desperate measures to keep the country going. $125 million goes to direct military purposes but this is hardly a trickle.

It is not certain whether the venal “court” around Chiang has given him this picture in toto.

A disaster of tremendous importance overwhelmed China with the fall of Mukden. All Manchuria, with its million square miles and 40 million population, is now in Stalinist hands.

The rout of Kuomintang armies is complete in the North. Whole army corps surrendered, tens of thousands joined the Stalinist armies and the number of dead, wounded and lost runs into the hundreds.

The fall of Manchuria dramatises the shift in power to the Chinese Communist Party. The Kuomintang is proved completely incapable of defending its own territories and its own rule; the fortunes of the Kuomintang are at a

The armies of Chinese Stalinism are advancing on the Kuomintang capital at Nanking. The extent of social disintegration of the Kuomintang is even more rapid than the advance of the Communist Party armies and this factor alters the picture.

Even the bailiwick of T V Soong in Canton, which seemed so secure a few months ago, is no longer immune to the national tendencies. Of the hated Four Families who rule and plunder Nationalist China, T V Soong is perhaps the most favoured by America. In his direction of ECA in China, Roger Lapham distributed the bulk of it to South China, mainly in Kwangtung

The last few weeks have seen the political initiative in China fall to the Communists, on the heels of their military victories.

Many groups which waited, before committing themselves to hear Chiang Kai-shek’s New Year’s Day message now feel released from any loyalty to his disintegrating state and have gone over to defeatism or are making overtures to the Stalinists.

The death-throes of the Kuomintang will find few sympathisers as all who possibly can do so with safety are joining the scramble to disassociate themselves from the regime and jump on the new bandwagon. The Stalinists are

Stalinist armies continued to mop up in North China with great strides this past week as Central Government troops pulled back to the Yangtze River as the next defence line.

The biggest gains for the CP were in the easy and bloodless conquest of Tientsin and Tangku, its port. Only Peiping still stands, but it is only a matter of time before it too surrenders.

The most interesting aspect of these otherwise clearly foreshadowed military events is that the leadership of the “peace movements” in all of these Northern cities which are completely surrounded by Stalinist armies and have been for