SLAUGHTER SHANGHAI

UNDER direct orders from Moscow, the Chinese CP agreed to the following terms for collaboration with Chiang Kai-chek:

ARU-ОНОЛ.

To hand over to Chiang a full list of its members in the Kuomintang.

That communist membership of any committee should be limited to one-third—a permanent minority.

That communists were banned from being head of any Kuomintang or governinent department.

That any instruction issued by the Communist Party to its own members had to be approved in advance by the Kuomintang.

These terms were accepted, though Chiang had staged a coup in the southern base of Canton and arrested more leading communists and trade unionists. (News of this was rigorously suppressed in the Soviet Union.) Chiang Kal-shek Stalin was prepared to go even farther than that. When challenged by the Left Opposition, he admitted that he had instructed the Chinese Communist Party by telegram to restrain the agrarian revolution in order to preserve 'unity' in the Kuomintang.' In fact there were frequent discussions between Borodin and Chiang on the best way to limit Communist influence in the Kuomintang.?

The communists permitted all power to: be centralized in Chiang's hands. When the northern military expedition got under way, all Party and government offices were subordinated to him. This established in China precisely that bourgeois control over the mass movement which Lenin' had warned against.

Meanwhile, Chiang, postponed the final bloodbath because still needed the communists. Meanwhile the key to. success in the nationalist campaign was the strategic city of Shanghai. Here there was a powerful workers' movement and the communists were strong. As the nationalist northern expedition approached, the Shanghai workers responded with an unprecedented strike wave.

But, as 350,000 Shanghai workers poured out into the streets, Chiang halted his army 25 miles outside the city.

There was nothing to prevent him taking the city - but he waited until the reactionary General Li Pao-chang slaughtered the Shanghai workers. (Li was later rewarded by Chiang with the command of the Eighth Nationalist Army.)

One month before this hapDered. , Stalin had written: 'The Kuomintang is an anti-imperialist party which is waging a revolutionary struggle against the imperialists and their agents in Yet despite the wholesale massacre of Shanghai workers, they rose again. This time they took Shanghai. Then - under the orders of the Moscow-directed Communist Party, they, handed tha nnwer to Chiang Kai-shek. IF MINCI IN LAGNA Chiang, now had no further ise for the communists. Indeed, actions like the taking of Shanghai showed that the working class had become a danger which even the Stalinists might not be able to hold in check.

And so the destruction began.

In February, the General Union of Kanchow was smashed and its leaders murdered. In March Chiang arrested any communist and left-wing leader in Nanchang, closed down the unions and students' association and suppressed all newspapers.

The same happened in Kiukang, in Nanking, in Wuhan and everywhere Chiang's troops were in control.

But in Shanghai, half a million armed workers were mobilized. Chiang had 3,000 troops, many of whom were sympathetic to the workers.

Meanwhile, according to Isaacs* Chinese bankers and merchants offered $15m on condition that labhe suppress communist and our activities.

The communists, however, welcomed Chiang as a liberator and on April 12, 1927, he showed his gratitude. Armed soldiers, assisted in places by foreign troops -- particularly the French attacked union and labour headquarters, shooting everyone they found there. of his teeth from the headquart- One who ecraned hu the ckin почирии LAST RAI ers of the General Labour Union was Chou En-lai.

Too late, the communist leadership called for a General Strike which was answered by 100,000 workers. They were shot down in the Streets. Chiang had taken over.

Incredibly, the Communist Interrational wrote to Chiang Kai-shek complaining that he had 'broken his agreement' and asking for a meeting to preserve revolutionary unity"!

Even after the Shanghai massacre, Stalin continued to defend Ine policy of collaboration with the Kuomintang.

He wrote: "Chiang Kai-shek's coup is often appraised by the Opposition as the decline of the Chinese revolution. That is a mistake. Of course, the coup was bound to result in a partial defeat for the workers in a number of areas.

'But it is merely partial and temporary. In point of fact, with Chiang Kai-shek's coup, revolution as a whole has entered a higher phase of development. Chiang Kai-shek's coup was one of those zig-zags.""

So, after the Kuomintang had openly emerged as the party of the bourgeoisie, Stalin advocated collaboration with the 'left' Kuomintang!

The Chinese communists obediently sought to work in subordination to the 'left' Wang Chiang-wei, who was based at Wuhan. They suffered exactly the same fate at his hands as they had at Chiang Kai-shek's."

Trotsky analysed the role of Stalin not as consciously counter-revolutionary - he did not make this characterization until Stalinism worked for the victory of Hitler in 1933 but as the fruits of a fundamental departure from Leninism:

'Together with the new conditions of existence the bureaucracy acquired new methods of thinking. The Bolshevik Party led the masses.

The bureaucracy began to order them about. ... The bureaucracy was compelled to resort to conmand in order to secure its own interests against those of the masses. ... The Moscow leaders began quite seriously to imagine that they could compel the Chinese bourgeoisie to move to the left of its interests and the Chinese workers and peasants to the rieht of theirs.

•Yet it is the very essence of revolution that the exploited as well as the exploiters invest their interests with the most extreme expression. If hostile classes could move along diagonals, there would be no need for a civil war. Armed by the authority of the October Revolution and the Communist International • • the bureaucracy transformed the young Chinese Communist Party from a motive force into a brake at the most important moment of the revoluThe crushing of the Chinese workers and peasants set back the revolution by 20 years. It also assisted Stalin to strengthen 's sr; in the Soviet lion cili more on to the parges end no. ders of the Bolsheviks in 1930s.

Trotsky and his supporters had been right all along in their warnings about the role of Chiang Kai-shek. "But when Oppositionists expressed hope that their correctness against Stalin's policies manld stronathan them Tratelv would suenguicu шсШ, LIULORY ad to tell them that it would not. Political struggles, he explained, are won not by the correctness or otherwise of ideas alone, but by the development of material forces. The defeat of the Chinese Revolution intensified the isolation of Russia and thereby strengthened the bureauIt was the fate of the Left Upposition io be beaten back and isolated it predicted, analysed.

very defeats fought against and TOMORROW:

STALIN SUPPORTS CHIANG KAI-SHEK AGAINST MAO. ' Stalin: 'Collected Works', Vol. 10, p. 18. * Isaacs on. cit.. D. 97. 3 Robert Black: Stalinism Britain', p. 65. New Park Publications. • op. cit., p. 172. " Stalin: 'Collected Works', 9, pp. 264-265. " For a full account to this see Harold Isaacs' 'Tragedy of Chinese Revolution', Chaps XI" Trotsky's Introduction to Isaacs, p.xxui.

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