THE BLOODY PACT WITH

The admission of China to the United Nations and the recent Nixon tour place a question mark over the future of Chiang Kai-shek's puppet regime in Taiwan (Formosa).

Chiang Kai-shek was the man who-after being made an honorary president of the Communist International by Stalin-butchered the Chinese Communist Party In 1927. Only the vote of Trotsky was recorded against this honouring of Chiang.

Subsequently, 1945, Stalin declared Chiang to be the legitimate ruler of China, and preferable to the Chinese communists.

China was one of the main sources of conflict between Stalin on the one hand, and Trotsky and the Left Opposition on the other.

Stalin merged the young Chinese Communist Party with the capitalist Kuomintang, forcing upon it the programme and organizational discipline of Chinese nationalism. This disarmed the Communist Party in the face of an inevitable right-wing turn once the feudal reaction had been defeated and compromise secured with imperialism.

Lenin, in his Theses on the National and Colonial Question July, 1920), had dealt with the relations between communist and bourgeois nationalist parties: 'The Communist International should collaborate provisionally with the revolutionary movement of the colonies and backward countries, and even form an alliance with it, but it must not amalgamate with it: it must unconditionally maintain the independence of the proletarian movement, even if it is only in an embryonic stage?

Stalin, however, declared that Chiang Kai-shek's bourgeois-nationalist party, the Kuomintang, was 'revolutionary bloc of four classes'the workers, capitalists, peasants and landlords.

The Kuomintang leaders were happy to use the communists as a weapon against their rivals, the foreign capitalists.

In 1924 they adopted a policy of friendship with the Soviet Union, co-operation with the communists and mobilization of the massesthough even at that stage their right wing was violently opposed to this move This danger was ignored by Stalin, even though there was early evidence of anti-communist moves in the Kuomintang. tang May, 1924, the Whampoa military academy-which was to become Chiang's armed base-was established with Russian funds and with Russian advisers, and Chiang was installed as director. to challenge the landlords the But as the peasants began split developed among the Whampoa cadets. The sons of landlord families formed the right-wing Sun-Yat Sen society formed the League of Military and communist cadets The workers, too, tried to break through the restriction placed on them by the communists, who were acting on the line from Moscow transmitted through the Communist International's chief adviser in China, Borodin.

In 1925 the Canton-HongKong strikes were held back by the Stalinists, wno later claimed that the workers were 'not ready' to move on to revolution.

Trotsky • answered: 'Let us admit, that the Cantonese workers were still too weak to establish their own power. What, generally, is the weak spot of the masses? Their inclination follow the ploiters. In this case the first duties of revolutionists is to help the workers liberate themselves from servile confidence.

'Nevertheless, the work done by the bureaucracy of the Comintern Was diametrically opposed to this. It inculcated in the masses the notion of the necessity to submit to the bourgeoisie and it declared that the enemies of the bourgeoisie were their enemies.

This insistence that the workers and peasants should go no further than fighting the enemies the Chinese bourgeoisie played right into the hands of Chiang Kai-shek.

Chiang certainly needed the communists at this stage. The imperialists, realizing that their own direct oppression merely stirred up more revolutionary oppositio:, came to rely more and more on the antinationalist forces in Chinaas in the East River Wars of 1925, for example.

Stalin: Ignored the dangers The imperialists' direct allies were the Chinese compradores, the brokers for foreign capital — a powerful section of the bourgeoisie whose interests intertwined with those of the imperialists. This section of the bourgeoisie clashed with the nationalist aims of their rivals, who dreamed of competing with, and eventually replacing, the imperialists in industry and In the main, the old warlord caste, who were based also on the landlords in the countryside, were the instruments of resistance on behalf of the anti-nationalist bourgeoisie.

In order to use the strength of the Chinese masses against these forces, the nationalist bourgeoisie required a left face. At one time even the Canton Chamber of Commerce used to end its policy statements Long Live the World Sun Yat Sen (seated), the fou In 1927 Chiang turned on the ( nEvUluuull : Darnlntion'l But the nationalist bou geoisie had more in commo with the foreign capitalist than they had with their ow workers. Everybody reco nized this, except the Stalir ists.

For example, at the heigh of the Shanghai General Strik of 1925, the imperialist 'Nort China Daily News' addresse itself to the nationalist Shang hai capitalists:

'We know by long years ( friendly association with you that you do not sympathiz with the rioters and strikers.

This struck home becaus the striking workers, regret tably, did not always make th desirable distinction betwee foreign and Chinese employer: And the Chinese employer collaborated with the imperia ists to break the strike.

Harold Isaacs also describe a banquet in shangnal in 194o ing< at which the spokesman for the foreign capitalists declared: 'Why not set up a different leadership from that to which they (the workers) have been accustomed? It needs men like some we have here tonight.' And the spokesman for the Chinese employers replied: 'For our respective and common interests we must by all means prevent a worse conflagration than that of last year.

Yet, in 1926, not only was Chiang Kai-shek elected Honorary President of the Communist International, but an extreme right-wing member of the Kuomintang — Hu Han Minh, a landlord who had been implicated in the murder of communists-was admitted to the sixth plenum of the Communist International and elected to the committee of the Peasants' International as a rel pe rej In‹ Pa ap! Co Ita Int Ka Kc ho lea mi ml ter CC Ch Ch munist prisoner in Shanghal presentative or the Chinese 11. - n1: asants. (Contrast that with Lenin's ¡ection of the Kautskyite dependent Social Democratic rty • ot Germany, which plied for membership of the, immunist International in 20, and the expulsion of thel ilian Socialist Party from the ternational, also in 1920.) Yet that same year, Chiang li-shek disarmed the Hong ing strike committee, placed Soviet advisers under i use arrest and jailed 50 ding communists in the litary units.

He still needed the comunists — but on his own 'ms.

INTINUED TOMORROW eon Trotsky: Problems of inese Revolution', p. 254. Tarold Isaacs, 'Tragedy of inese Revolution', , p.83. saacs op. cit. p. 86.