Many might point to China's (and Russia's) historical 'backwardness', imposed-from-without by the Allies.
It's only since around 2000 that China has really finally gotten its own industrialization, leapfrogging into the industrial-digital paradigm, then being leapfrogged itself by South Korea.
It's undeniably its own *country*, due to finally rebuffing Japanese imperialism, but there's still that aftermath regarding Maoism versus the nationalists (KMT), which is that standing, unresolved 'friction' between the standing, prevailing *bureaucracy*, and the on-the-outs *bourgeoisie*. (In the West the *bourgeoisie* prevailed, for a markedly different social 'complexion' of class rule, but in China / The East it's the *bureaucracy* that's been dominant.)
The interest in Marxism grew as China’s nascent working class was increasingly involved in strikes and boycotts which grew in intensity, ‘affecting all regions and all branches of industry’.137
A series of strikes in 1922 showed the potential of the new movement. A strike by 2,000 seamen in Hong Kong spread, despite a proclamation of martial law, until a general strike by 120,000 forced the employers to capitulate. A strike by 50,000 miners in the British owned KMAS in northern China was not as successful. The mine’s private police, British marines and warlord armies attacked the miners and arrested their union leaders. Nevertheless, support for the strike from workers, intellectuals and even some bourgeois groups enabled the strikers to hold out long enough to win a wage rise. Chinese police broke up the first big strike by women workers—20,000 employees in silk-reeling factories—and brought the leaders before a military tribunal. Clashes between British police and workers in British-owned factories in Hankou culminated in a warlord shooting down 35 striking rail workers and executing a union branch secretary who refused to call for a return to work. Such defeats halted the advance of the workers’ movement, but did not destroy the spirit of resistance. Rather they led to a hardening of class consciousness and an increased determination to take up the struggle when the opportunity arose.
This happened in the years 1924-27. Canton in the south had become the focus of the nationalist intellectuals. Sun Yat-sen had established a constitutional government there, but its hold on power was precarious, and he was looking for wider support. He asked Soviet Russia to help reorganise his Kuomintang and invited members of China’s recently formed Communist Party to join. The value of this support showed when ‘comprador’ capitalists connected with British interests tried to use their own armed force, the 100,000 strong Merchant Volunteers, against him. The Communist-led Workers’ Delegate Conference came to his rescue. Its Labour Organisations Army helped break the power of the Merchant Volunteers, while print workers prevented newspapers supporting them.
The power of combining workers’ protests and national demands was shown again later in 1925 outside Canton. A general strike shut down Shanghai after police fired on a demonstration in support of a strike in Japanese-owned cotton mills. For a month union pickets armed with clubs controlled the movement of goods and held strikebreakers as prisoners, while there were solidarity strikes and demonstrations in more than a dozen other cities. Another great strike paralysed Hong Kong for 13 months, raising nationalist demands (such as equal treatment for Chinese people and Europeans) as well as economic demands. Tens of thousands of Hong Kong strikers were given food and accommodation in Canton, where:
The responsibilities of the strike committee went far beyond the normal field of activity of a union organisation… During the summer of 1925 the committee became, in fact, a kind of workers’ government—and indeed, the name applied to it at the time…was ‘Government No 2’. The committee had at its disposal an armed force of several thousand men.138
The strike helped to create an atmosphere in which the nationalist forces in Canton began to feel they were powerful enough to march northwards against the warlords who controlled the rest of the country. The march, known as ‘the Northern Expedition’, began in the early summer of 1926. Commanded by General Chiang Kai Shek, its organising core was a group of army officers straight out of the Russian-run Whampoa training academy. Members of the workers’ army created around the Hong Kong strike rushed to volunteer for it.
The march north was a triumph in military terms. The warlord armies, held together only by short term mercenary gain, could not stand against its revolutionary enthusiasm. Workers in the cities controlled by the warlords went on strike as the Northern Expedition approached. In Hubei and Hunan the unions armed themselves and became ‘workers’ governments’ to an even greater extent than those in Canton during the Hong Kong strike.139 By March 1927 the expedition was approaching Shanghai. A general strike erupted involving 600,000 workers, and an uprising by union militias took control of the city before Chiang Kai Shek arrived.140 Power in the city passed into the hands of a government controlled by the workers’ leaders, although it included nationalist members of the big bourgeoisie. For a few days it seemed as if nothing could stop the advance of revolutionary nationalism to destroy the power of the warlords, break the hold of the foreign powers and end the fragmentation, corruption and impoverishment of the country.
But these hopes were to be dashed, just as the similar hopes in Ireland and India, and for similar reasons. The victories of the Northern Expedition depended on the revolutionary mood encouraged by its advance. But the officers of the army were drawn from a social layer which was terrified by that mood. They came from merchant and landowning families who profited from the exploitation of workers and, even more, from the miserable conditions of the peasants. They had been prepared to use the workers’ movement as a pawn in their manoeuvres for power—and, like a chess piece, they were prepared to sacrifice it. Chiang Kai Shek had already cracked down on the workers’ movement in Canton by arresting a number of Communist militants and harassing the unions.141 Now he prepared for much more drastic measures in Shanghai. He allowed the victorious insurrectionary forces to hand him the city and then met with wealthy Chinese merchants and bankers, the representatives of the foreign powers and the city’s criminal gangs. He arranged for the gangs to stage a pre-dawn attack on the offices of the main left wing unions. The workers’ pickets were disarmed and their leaders arrested. Demonstrations were fired on with machine-guns, and thousands of activists died in a reign of terror. The working class organisations which had controlled the city only days earlier were destroyed.142
Chiang Kai Shek was victorious over the left, but only at the price of abandoning any possibility of eliminating foreign domination or warlord control. Without the revolutionary élan which characterised the march from Canton to Shanghai the only way he could establish himself as nominal ruler of the whole country was by making concessions to those who opposed Chinese national aspirations. Over the next 18 years his government became infamous for its corruption, gangsterism and inability to stand up to foreign invaders.
The episode was tragic proof that middle class nationalist leaders would betray their own movement if that was the price of keeping workers and peasants in their place. It was also a sign of something else—an abandonment of revolutionary principles by those who now ran Russia, for they had advised Chinese workers to trust Chiang even after his actions against them in Canton.
The experience of the nationalist revolution in Egypt was, in its essentials, the same as that in China, India and Ireland. There was the same massive ferment in the aftermath of the war, and a de facto alliance in 1919 between the nationalist middle class and groups of strikers in industries such as the tramways and railways. Repeated upsurges in struggle forced a limited concession from Britain—a monarchic government which left key decisions in British hands. Yet the main nationalist Wafd party turned its back on workers’ struggles and formed a government within the terms of this compromise, only to be driven from office by British collaborators because it did not have sufficient forces to defend itself.
Harman, _People's History of the World_, pp. 457-460
.
- By Tainari88
- By wat0n
- By Puffer Fish