The Chinese revolution of 1925-27 was one of the high points of working-class militancy in the twentieth century. By the mid-1920s a wave of strikes swept the country, with workers’ organisations becoming major powers in the main cities, with ever-greater numbers of workers coming out, joining unions and taking control of the streets.
At the centre of working-class militancy was the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The party held its first congress in July 1921, when a dozen delegates represented only 50 members. Before 1925, it still had fewer than a thousand members, yet by early 1927 it had more than 57,000 militants, held the leadership of many unions and armed pickets and led peasant organisations.
The Guomindang nationalist party also grew out of this ferment. Since the early 1920s it had been in government in Guangzhou and under Chiang Kai-shek built a powerful army that began to defeat the warlords who divided China. Since 1923, Communists had also been members of the Guomindang, running many strikes together, with both enjoying substantial support, financial and military, from the USSR.
In April 1927, Chiang Kai-shek ended the alliance by orchestrating the massacre of the CCP and other worker-militants. At least 2,000 Communists and militants were killed in Shanghai alone, and thousands more arrested or sacked from their jobs. Similar massacres were carried out months later in Wuhan and others places.
The defeat of the Chinese revolution in 1925-27 has been interrogated by historians ever since. The role of the Russian state, led by Stalin and the Communist International (Comintern) is a key part of any explanation. Historian Alexander Pantsov has utilised materials from Russian archives to shed new light on the defeat.
Pantsov’s book, The Bolsheviks and the Chinese Revolution (2000) clarified the extent of Stalin’s mistakes, while providing a more nuanced account of Trotsky’s Left Opposition efforts to challenge Comintern policy. Therefore Pantsov’s book, Karl Radek on China: Documents from the Former Secret Soviet Archives (2021) is a welcome contribution to the real history of the Chinese revolution.
Radek in the Comintern
Karl Radek makes for an interesting prism through which to understand the debates around the Chinese revolution. By the time of his engagement with Chinese affairs, he had already spent two decades as a revolutionary socialist intervening in the European labour movement. In 1920, Radek began working for the Comintern, where he was a member of the Presidium and secretary of its executive committee (ECCI). Over the same period, he was a member of the central committee of the Russian Communist Party. In 1923 he joined the Left Opposition, but lost his Comintern position after the failed October 1923 German uprising.
Radek made at least two significant contributions to Chinese politics during this time when the Comintern was a real general staff for working class revolution. First, in July 1922, Radek drafted the most important instruction to Hendricus Sneevliet (Maring), as guidelines for his work as Comintern representative in China. This instruction set the strategic and tactical orientation of the young communist party for the following five years. It stated:
“The ECCI regards the Guomindang as a revolutionary party that preserves the testaments of the Revolution of 1912 and seeks to build an independent Chinese Republic. In light of this, the tasks of Communists in China must be as follows: The education of ideologically independent elements which must in future form the embryo of the Communist Party… Communists are obligated to support the Guomindang and that wing of it that is based on workers and artisans… Communists must set up groups of supporters inside the Guomindang itself and in trade unions…”
Second, on 23 November 1922, Radek spoke on the "eastern question" at the fourth Comintern congress, where he outlined the assessment of Chinese conditions and priorities. He said:
“The first task of the Chinese comrades is to focus on what the Chinese movement is capable of. Comrades, you must understand that in China neither the victory of socialism nor the establishment of a soviet republic is on the agenda. Unfortunately, even the question of national unity has not yet been historically placed on the agenda in China.”
Given the conjuncture in China and globally at the time, Radek’s judgement was realist and accepted with little dissent. It was the basis on which the CCP built itself, while advancing the legitimate nationalist movement against imperial intervention and domestic ruling classes.
Stalin’s policy
However within Russian workers’ state itself and the Comintern, the balance of forces was beginning to change. Workers’ rule in Russia hung on the thread. The state bureaucracy had begun to strangle the organs of workers’ democracy, the soviets, unions and the party itself. In autumn 1923, while Lenin lay paralysed by another stroke, Trotsky led the Left Opposition against the policies of Stalin, Zinoviev and Bukharin. Radek to his credit joined Trotsky’s opposition. However the oppositionists were defeated and mostly lost their leading positions over the following years.
The Comintern line on China began to change within the sheath of the original policy, despite the growing working class struggle. At the fifth Comintern congress in June 1924, Dmitrii Manuilsky for the first time raised the idea of “workers' and peasants' parties”. He was supported by Manabendra Nath Roy, who advanced the formula of a “people's party”. Nothing immediately came of these formulations. The Congress did not debate them any further. Privately, Stalin told Manuilsky that “the creation of such hybrid parties in India and China would be harmful”, but were a possibility in “very backward countries”. However the conception of “workers' and peasants' parties” would soon be applied to the Guomindang.
Stalin elaborated his own views on China in a speech at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East (KUTY) on 18 May 1925. Stalin proposed that the Chinese communists could radically transform the nature of the Guomindang through seizing power within the party, allied to leftists within its ranks. In China, Stalin argued, the goal should not be a united national front but a revolutionary bloc, and “that bloc can assume the form of a single party, a workers' and peasants' party, after the model of the Guomindang”. He argued that communists could establish their hegemony inside such a bloc and that the CCP were on the brink of doing so.
This set the pattern for Comintern policy in China for the following years. At the sixth ECCI plenum February and March 1926, the Guomindang was characterised as a “people’s revolutionary party”. The Politburo voted to admit the Guomindang as a sympathiser party to the Comintern, with only Trotsky dissenting. In early 1927, this was carried out. Despite changed conditions in China, including growing working class militancy, the size of the CCP and the opposition of the Guomindang right-wing to the united front, Stalin insisted that Comintern support for the Guomindang continue.
Radek’s orthodoxy
During 1924, Radek began to study, speak and write on Chinese history. From July 1924, his articles on China appeared in official publications. In autumn 1924, Radek gave his first public speech on China at the Bolshoi Theatre. In spring 1925, he joined a commission organising the Sun Yat-sen University of the Toilers of China (UTK), a special higher education institute for Guomindang and communist cadres in Moscow. In November 1925, Radek was appointed rector of this university.
Pantsov argues that until summer 1926, Radek fully supported Stalin’s line on China. In October 1925, Radek described the nationalists as the “worker-peasant Guomindang” and the Guangzhou government as “the first worker-peasant government” of China. On 26 March 1926, Radek contended that nothing serious had happened the week before with Chiang Kai-shek's coup, despite the arrest of communists and circumscribing of their activities in Guangzhou. This was a serious turn, indicative of a breach in the united front and certainly a matter on which the Comintern should have reassessed. In April 1926, Trotsky proposed the CCP leave the “bloc within” the Guomindang and instead rally as an independent party. This was rejected by the Politburo, with Radek supporting Stalin.
Radek rethinks
Radek’s rethinking can be traced through the essays and lectures in this volume, published by Pantsov in English for the first time. On 22 June 1926, he finished a polemic, ‘On the Fundamentals of Communist Policy in China’. He argued that in the current conjuncture:
“From that situation there are two possible outcomes. Either a renunciation by the Communists of their own independent policy, a complete subordination to the Guomindang… or it is necessary to move from the present form to a bloc with the Guomindang as an alliance of independent parties… Now the moment has arrived, when we must table the question of altering the form of the relations between the Guomindang and the CCP.”
Radek sent his essay to Trotsky, who replied on 26 June offering broad endorsement. Trotsky added:
“The organisational cohabitation of the Guomindang and the Communist Party was correct and progressive for a specific epoch, which, however, has now come to an end. In the current epoch, this cohabitation has become more and more of an obstacle. The chronological moment is not put forward in the theses.”
In August-September 1926, Radek presented his new views cautiously in letters to the Stalinist leadership of the Russian Communist Party. In October 1926, at the party’s fifteenth conference, Radek was subjected to caustic criticism.
Radek responded by retreating into academic work. Between late 1926 and early 1927, he reworked a course on Chinese history. The 17 lectures compared China and the West over the past three millennia, then the evolution of China in the nineteenth-century under the influence of foreign capitalism, finishing with an assessment of class relations in China at the beginning of the twentieth century. Some 250-300 copies were published in the UTK Press at the time, but only now in English.
Although by mid-1926, Trotsky, Radek, Zinoviev, Kamenev and others formed the United Opposition to Stalin, they did not come to a common assessment or political conclusions on China. Trotsky maintained his position that the CCP should withdraw from the Guomindang, Zinoviev favoured the continued orientation of Chinese communists to work within the Guomindang and Radek vacillated.
Opposition to Stalinism
At the beginning of 1927, Radek retreated on the united front in China, no longer demanding the departure of the CCP from the Guomindang. Radek presented his views in the literary-political journal Novyi Mir, the newspaper Izvestiia and in a series of lectures. The stenographic texts of these lectures are published in this collection, notably "Driving Forces of the Chinese Revolution", delivered on 13 March 1927 at the Communist Academy. The Stalinists were particularly incensed by Radek’s Izvestiia article, which made the first public mention of Chiang Kai-shek’s March 1926 coup against the CCP. On 6 April 1927, the Stalinists dismissed Radek from his post at UTK.
In early May 1927, Radek produced a long essay, intended for publication as a pamphlet, called "The ‘Betrayal’ of the National Movement by the Chinese Upper Bourgeoisie". Radek admitted his previous assessment that the Guomindang was some kind of workers’ and peasants’ party was wrong. However he defended the original united front tactic.
On 17 May 1927, Radek again publicly criticised the Comintern's China policy, speaking at the Institute of World Economy and International Politics during the debate on a report by the Stalinist Lev Geller. On 25 May 1927, at the eighth ECCI plenum, the oppositionists submitted the "Declaration of the Eighty-three". Trotsky, Zinoviev, Radek, and other old Bolsheviks criticising Stalin’s China policy, which continued to uphold the united front with the ‘Left’ Guomindang, despite Chiang’s massacre a month before.
However it was not until 20 June 1927 that Radek (and Zinoviev) agreed with Trotsky’s demand for an immediate end to the CCP's entrist policy in the Guomindang. On 2 July 1927, the oppositionists sent a long article to Pravda, demanding the CCP leave the Guomindang, the communist ministers withdraw from the Wuhan Guomindang government and the Guomindang be excluded from the Comintern. It was never published.
In December 1927, the fifteenth party congress expelled Trotsky, Radek and other oppositionists from the party. In January 1928, Radek was exiled until May 1929. He capitulated to Stalin, making a declaration that he was leaving the opposition. By 1930, he again began to speak on China, but now for orthodox Stalinist positions. This did not save him. He was arrested in 1936, tried for conspiracy and given a 10-year sentence. On 19 May 1939, he was stabbed to death by others prisoners in the Verkhneuralsk isolation prison.
Radek’s politics on China lagged behind Trotsky, but he came to sharply criticise Stalin’s line. Pantsov’s book is a welcome addition to the literature on the real history of the Chinese revolution.
Chinese history
In addition, Karl Radek’s historical work on China contained in the book also provide one of the first attempts to apply Marxist analysis to centuries of Chinese history. In particular, his series of 17 lectures, History of the Revolutionary Movement in China (1926-27) and his unpublished essay, Controversial Questions of Chinese History (26 November 1926) repay close reading. While Radek’s efforts were flawed in places, he also highlighted some significant matters that deserve credit.
Radek was very blunt about his own deficiencies. He told students during the lectures, “I do not want any of you to think that I claim to be a Sinologist. I do not know the language and I have not studied Chinese problems for long”. He had no wish “to claim the title of an expert mandarin”, but merely to lay out working hypotheses, “indicating what to look for, where to go, what questions arise before us”. This was to guide young Chinese and other comrades studying the history. He was mindful that “the material is still very limited” and fully expected that “every scientific hypothesis in future… will be exposed as fallacious in many ways”. Radek was clear that they were pioneering a Marxist investigation of Chinese history and much of what he had to say was tentative. This was the right approach. The tragedy is not that Radek made mistakes, but that Stalin cut short this open, exploratory research.
How the walls were broken down
The lasting and significant contribution made by Radek was his description of the way China was incorporated into the global capitalist economy, through a combination of global capital and foreign state violence.
Radek surveyed the period from the Opium Wars between Britain and China (1839-42 and 1856-60), when foreign capital first entered China, until the Chinese Revolution of 1911, the time when modern industrial capitalism began to take root in China. Although trade concessions were made to British and French imperialists, Radek argued that for much the nineteenth century, capitalist development was limited.
Radek thought the Sino-Japanese war (1894-95) and subsequent involvement of Japanese, Russian and German capital were the accelerant for capitalist development. Japan took control of Korea, Formosa (now Taiwan) and the Liaodong peninsula with Port Arthur, gaining effective control over North China. The Chinese government was obligated to pay an indemnity. Other big powers rushed in to gain more concessions, including Russia to extend the Trans-Siberian Railway into China.
Imperialist intervention triggered attempts to save China by means of reform from above, such as the Hundred Days of Reform. It also provoked the Boxer rebellion, which was drowned in blood by the imperial powers.
Radek dated the modern capitalist development of China to the building of railways. He wrote:
“The railroads which were built in the period from 1898 to the Revolution of 1911 were, consequently, in one part of the imperialist world a direct means of seizure; in another part a means of economic enslavement and primary mortgage which, in the event of international complications, naturally, would provide the stimulus for political seizure. Therefore, these railroads became one of the primary sources for the growth of Chinese national consciousness.”
With the railways came heavy industry, mining and textile factories. Capitalist development also brought banking, debt and taxation.
“The collapse of the state resulted from the fact that foreign capital imposed enormous debts on China, and took half of China’s revenues to secure these debts. On the other hand, the collapse of state power had larger consequences… a struggle commenced among various military cliques.”
Radek went on to examine the break up of relations in the Chinese countryside. He argued:
“Peasants, ruined by an aggregation of disasters – oppression by militarism, competition from foreign goods, famine and other disasters brought about by the absence of concern on the part of the state regarding restoration of the timber industry and the regulation of rivers - are driven into penury, fall into the hands of merchant capital, and that this merchant capital is the primary factor in the destruction of the peasant economy, a parasite growing at the expense of the total pauperisation of the peasantry.”
Imperialism
Radek used his lectures to reflect on the impact of imperialism on China. He argued:
“The role of imperialism was that of smashing the Chinese wall of social stagnation which separated China from the rest of the world. The railroads which forced their way into China brought it into contact with the world economy, and rendered possible the influence of the world economy. The investment of foreign capital helped to bring together surplus labour in the villages with the material elements existing in the country which, together, made up the capitalist economy, destroying the foundations of the old Chinese economy in the countryside…”
Although Radek recognised that “imperialism played an enormous progressive role in the development of China”, he emphasised that his analysis was “not a defence of imperialism or capitalism”. The “progressive factor” of imperialism in awakening China was the creation of Chinese bourgeoisie and the Chinese proletariat, classes that soon brought forth a broad nationalist movement. He also registered that imperialism “changed from a factor promoting development into a factor inhibiting the capitalist development of China”.
Political conclusions
Radek drew some significant political conclusions from his history. He argued that, although modern capitalism had taken over only the coastal regions of China, "feudalism" in China was largely past. Radek characterised the exploiting class in the China of his day, not as feudal (or semi-feudal) but as capitalist.
Second, Radek argued the Chinese bourgeoisie was too weak, too tied to foreign imperialism and too intertwined with the landlord class to be a revolutionary actor. He maintained: “The Chinese bourgeoisie cannot be the liberator of the peasantry.”
Third, the consequence of imperialist intervention and capitalist development was the creation of modern classes, securing the preconditions for revolution. Radek concluded that “the Chinese revolution will be, above all, a peasant war”, but that the working class would take part as well.
Politically this implied independent working class struggle within the national liberation movement against foreign imperialism – the stance that Trotsky had taken and juxtaposed to Stalin’s continued subordination of the CCP to the Guomindang.
Millennia of Chinese history
While Radek’s investigations of the recent history were extremely valuable for the political battles of the 1920s, his account of the previous millennia of Chinese history was largely speculative and erroneous.
According to Radek, feudal relations in China had dominated only until the third century BCE, the end of the Zhou dynasty. After that, a struggle for dominance by commercial capital began, with its eventual hegemony in the thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries. Radek regarded both the Han dynasty (206 BC-AD 220) and Ming dynasty (AD 1368-1644) as beginning with peasants taking over the state and destroying feudalism, only for feudalism to recrystallise, and “peasant dynasties degenerated into feudal dynasties”. Then, commercial capital was weakened, with the disintegration of the Mongol empire and the corresponding loss of an enormous foreign market for Chinese goods. This was why, Radek believed, China subsequently lagging behind the West.
Radek seems almost entirely wrong, both on the grounds of Marxist theory and through subsequent historical studies. Nowhere did he define “feudalism”, but it seems perverse that the “feudal” period started earlier and was destroyed much earlier than elsewhere globally. Similarly, Radek asserted that “commercial capitalism” grew up very early in China, but with no adequate explanation. Although Radek followed the Russian Marxist historian Mikhail Pokrovskii, Marx himself was clear that the presence of merchants and markets was not sufficient to signify the capitalist mode of production was extant. Similarly, Trotsky had challenged Pokrovskii’s interpretation of Russian history.
Radek also asserted that the peasants had at times ruled. He argued that “in China, unlike in European states, we see periods in which the peasants are victorious and establish their own governing power. In these periods, the bureaucracy is not a supra-class apparatus, but an apparatus representing the interests of the rural petty bourgeoisie, the peasantry”. Yet elsewhere he implied (rightly) that peasant rule was not possible. Radek failed to clarify the class character of Chinese society for more than two millennia.
Radek posed the question: if all the elements were present: commodity capital, artisans and a landless proletariat, why did a contemporary bourgeoisie not develop in China? He argued that capitalism had developed in Holland, England and Italy “thanks to capital accumulation through colonial policies”. By contrast, China had lost “massive opportunities” for colonial expansion after the fall of the Mongols, because “India established the rule of the Great Mughals, which was stronger” and “a revival which strengthened Persia”.
While of course colonial booty abetted the development of capitalism, it could not be the primary cause, or else Spain and Portugal would have been in the vanguard. Radek offered an exogenous explanation for capitalist development, rather than looking at the internal social relations of production. In states like England where peasants lost their direct access to the means of subsistence, they were drawn into dependence on markets and lost control of their surplus to landlords and merchants in the cities. In light of the rich and varied Marxist debates on the transition from feudalism to capitalism, Radek’s work adds very little.
What sort of class society?
Worse, Radek was dismissive of the emerging Marxist debate on the “Asiatic mode of production”, which may have helped to clarify the type of class society in earlier periods of Chinese history. It was well known that in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), Marx stated: “In broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production may be designated as epochs marking progress in the economic development of society.” In 1925, David Riazanov published some of Marx’s writing on China, and highlighted the “Asiatic mode of production”. In the same year, Eugene Varga wrote that China had seen “the formation of a ruling class of a very special type, unknown in the realm of European culture, namely, a class of literati”. In 1926, Anatolii Kantorovich discussed the system of social relations in China in the pre-capitalist epoch in similar terms.
Radek’s response was to rubbish these analyses as “Confucian legends” and to dismiss European literature about the nature of landed property in China as “the result of ignorance, the result of reports by European tourists and superficial writers about China”. He asserted that the existence of private property in land, with the right to sell, buy, and mortgage it, was sufficient to undermine any conception of a tributary class society based on an exploited peasantry.
On a political level, Radek was understandably defensive. In the May Day 1927 edition of Pravda, the Stalinist hack John Pepper argued that there was no large-scale landowning or serfdom in China. Instead Pepper asserted that the “Asiatic mode of production” in China meant it was an even earlier form of class society, thereby seeking to justify Stalin’s subordination of the CCP to the Guomindang.
However Radek’s position was methodologically flawed. He simply assumed that “the scheme of the development of society, which Marxism provides on the basis of the existence of the history of European humanity, fully corresponds to Chinese history”. He asserted that “there were no significant differences between the social conditions of China in the middle of the past century and the social conditions of West European countries in the epoch prior to the development within them of modern industry”. This was not empirically true. Nor did he apply Marx’s focus on surplus extraction, the key to modes of exploitation and therefore to modes of production.
The tragedy was that the defeat of the Chinese revolution 1925-27 triggered a vibrant discussion among Marxists in Russia about the class nature of Chinese society throughout its history – see Marian Sawer, Marxism and the Question of the Asiatic Mode of Production (1977) and John Barber, Soviet Historians in Crisis (1981). More significantly, Chinese socialists also took up the Asiatic mode of production debate – see Arik Dirlik, Revolution and History (1978). Radek’s lectures were translated by Trotskyist Liu Renjing and published in four Chinese editions in the early 1930s. Other Chinese Trotskyists argued ancient Chinese history had taken a different path to Europe.
The debate flourished until Stalin shut it down, ultimately in his Short Course (1938), which omitted the “Asiatic” altogether from his (unilinear) list of modes of production. The label of “feudalism” was imposed on China, irrespective of the actual relations that may have existed over centuries of history. Radek’s work did not challenge that orthodoxy and therefore is not the best starting point for contemporary Marxist histories of pre-capitalist China.
