Source: The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 47, 22 November 1948, pp. 1 & 3.
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America’s imperialist policy-makers are acutely alarmed over the staggering military reverses suffered by the Chiang Kai-shek regime. With the loss of Manchuria and North China, the Chiang dictatorship has little chance of surviving.
The impending downfall of the Chinese Franco is viewed by American Big Business as nothing less than a calamity. They fear that all China – first in population and second in size among countries of the world – may pass under Stalinist influence.
Should the working people of America join in Wall Street’s lamentations over the plight of Chiang Kai-shek? Should the labor movement join that section of the capitalist class clamoring for “all-out aid” to Chiang; that is, a vast Expeditionary Force to subjugate China’s estimated 461,000,000 people?
To answer these questions correctly, it is necessary to know precisely who Chiang Kai-shek is, what forces he represents and why he cannot maintain himself in power any longer without the aid of foreign imperialism.
In 1925–27 a great revolutionary upsurge occurred in China. The working class, inspired by the example of the Russian workers in the November 1917 revolution, sought to break the grip of China’s young but exceedingly greedy capitalist class and establish a government of their own.
They were backed by the vast peasant population which, sought to break up landlord monopoly of the land and end the feudal relations which held China in abysmal ignorance and poverty.
Unfortunately, leadership of this movement rested in the hands of the Stalin clique which was consolidating its power in the Soviet Union. Stalin forced the young Chinese Communists Party to submit to the Kuomintang, the bourgeois nationalist party dominated by Chiang Kai-shek.
At a favorable moment this warlord crushed the Chinese revolution, executing tens of thousands of militants, driving the labor movement underground, and setting up a personal dictatorship that was not exceeded in brutality by the regimes of Mussolini, Hitler or Franco.
Despite its savagery and its display of military force, Chiang’s bloody counter-revolution sapped the country’s strength and undermined China’s international position. One of the first major consequences of Chiang’s victory was the invasion of Manchuria by Japanese imperialism in 1931.
Occupied with holding down the lid on popular unrest, Chiang retreated before the Japanese. He called his refusal to resist the invasion a policy of “non-resistance.”
Finally, as the Japanese penetrated deeper and deeper into China, the landlords and capitalists became alarmed and in 1937 Chiang began putting up token resistance. However, he lost consistently and during World War II had to retreat far inland, leaving the key coastal areas in Japanese hands.
Meanwhile, the Stalinists in China, with the workers in the cities crushed, transferred their base of operations to the peasantry. They succeeded in winning a section of the country and considerable popularity by advocating and instituting the long-overdue land reforms.
At the end of World War II, American imperialism decided to underwrite Chiang Kai-shek’s regime. American ships and planes transported his troops into the key areas formerly held by the Japanese. American Army officers were assigned to train new armies for the dictator. The sluice-gates of the U.S. Public Treasury were opened up for Chiang’s benefit, and supplies poured into his hands from American armament factories.
Blood and iron, Wall Street hoped, would prove sufficient to bolster up Chiang. With this despot in power, American Big Business saw China, the richest prize of World War II, converted into an American colony.
But their calculations went awry. Not even American gold and American bullets could save Chiang from the disastrous consequences of his rule.
To man his armies, Chiang employed the most brutal methods cf forced conscription, roping batches of "recruits” together to prevent them from escaping. To furnish his armies with food and other essentials, he ravaged civilian supplies, dooming millions to starvation. In the unending strife, Chiang’s armies swept over the countryside like hordes of devouring locusts, stripping everything clean.
Inflation reached such fantastic heights that even the printing presses could no longer keep up with the demand for higher denomination notes to meet the astronomical price quotations that doubled and tripled from one day to the next.
Since the end of the war, the popular rebellion has grown in scope and intensity.
The difficulties faced by Chiang’s armies are immeasurably heightened by the hostility of the population. The opposing armies are welcomed and aided by the local population. Chiang’s American-trained, so-called “crack” troops melt away. A big percentage turn up, along with their American equipment in the opposing camp. The political factor, in brief, is coming more and more to the fore in China and is proving to be the decisive element in determining the outcome of the civil war.
American imperialism is now faced with the question, what to do next? A section of the capitalist class favor pulling completely out of China, leaving Chiang Kai-shek to his fate. They argue that continuing to send Chiang arms is useless since they slip through his military machine like a sieve.
Another section, unwilling to acknowledge the debacle of its foreign policy, contemplates sending American armies on a major scale to China, even at the risk of precipitating World War III.
Washington’s support of the Chiang regime has aroused bitter hatred of America among the Chinese people. This became evident soon after V-J Day, when giant student demonstrations in Shanghai and other cities demanded that American troops get out of China. Savage reprisals by Chiang succeeded in suppressing the open expression of this sentiment but not in wiping it out.
Two American citizens in Peiping wrote a letter to The New York Times, published in the Nov. 17 issue, calling attention to the hatred which American support of Chiang has aroused. Chiang’s planes, they say, follow a policy that “seems to be to bomb and strafe any concentration of people they can sight, to attack any building of size whatever its use, and to specialize on cities that have just suffered the trials of siege and capture whether there is any hope of early recovery or not.”
“The resentment and hatred piling up throughout China,” they observe, “and the identification of the Central Government and of America with meanness and destruction rather than construction are ominous.”
The leadership of the armies opposing Chiang Kai-shek rests at present with the Chinese Stalinists. Their record is not one to inspire confidence. Chiang could achieve power in 1927 only because of their blind docility in following Stalin’s orders.
Since that great betrayal of the Chinese people they have added to their inglorious record, selling out to Chiang again and again at crucial times and thus helping to stabilize his regime.
Even as late as 1945, when Stalin made a deal with Chiang, they acted the part of faithful pawns in the Kremlin’s moves on the international chessboard.
They were willing to again enter a coalition government with Chiang on the proposal of General Marshall, and this scheme blew up only because of Chiang’s refusal to go along with this policy.
Whether the top Stalinist bureaucrats would serve merely as Moscow’s lackeys should the popular rebellion thrust them into power over all China is not at all sure. The same factors that operated in tiny Yugoslavia compelling Tito to take an independent course, would apply in China with incomparably greater force.
The heads of the Chinese Stalinist machine are not Russian agents sent into a satellite country conquered by the Soviet Army.
They rest on their own apparatus, deeply rooted in the peasantry.
Yet to be heard from as an independent force is the Chinese working class. A number of strikes have already been recorded behind Chiang’s lines, but the Chinese workers, so long beaten down and suppressed, have not yet entered the political arena in their own right. When they do, they can decisively determine the course of events.
The first great problem facing the Chinese workers is to organize their own mass revolutionary party. At first they may turn toward the Stalinists in view of the victories of the Stalinist-led armies and the old tradition of the November 1917 revolution still associated in their minds with the Soviet Union.
But the Stalinists do not even advocate socialism for China. They talk of a long period of capitalist relations tempered with reforms. Such a program is completely illusory. It was advocated in Czarist Russia by the Mensheviks. Trotsky showed its falseness in theory and the Russian revolution showed in practice that the workers must take leadership of the country and establish a Workers and Farmers Government to solve the social problems of our era.
The Chinese Trotskyists are the only force in China that have consistently advocated this program.
Theirs is a heroic record. Many of them spent long years in Chiang’s dungeons, for they never made deals with the dictator as did the Stalinists or wavered in their political opposition to his despotic regime. During the Japanese invasion, they fought against the occupying forces without giving an inch to Chiang.
At present the Chinese Trotskyists are doing their utmost in the civil war against Chiang but without making any concessions whatsoever to Stalinism. They exist as an independent force. Although they are small in numbers, their recent convention registered important gains. They are exerting every effort toward building a mass revolutionary party of the working class.
Last updated on: 29 March 2023