Feng Yu-hsiang, obese and unscrupulous, was a militarist who had risen to power in the north-west by a series of shrewd and timely betrayals of his superior officers and allies. Originally nurtured on the bosoms of foreign missionaries, he first appeared in the world’s headlines as the “Christian General” who taught his hymn-singing soldiers the homely virtues of rustic simplicity. In 1924, he discovered that Moscow made up in generosity what it lacked in spiritual piety. He shed his Christian skin and joined the ranks of that peculiar species, raised exclusively on Chinese soil by Stalin and Bukharin, the “Bolshevised” militarists. The Holy Grail proved no match for Russian arms, Russian money, Russian advisers. Feng was quickly converted to the idea that a Russian gun in hand was worth a dozen haloes in the hereafter, especially when military reverses at the end of 1925 cut his “People’s Army” off from all other sources of munition supply.
“He left for Russia early in 1926. “Feng Yu-hsiang is coming to Moscow,” solemnly said a dispatch to the New York Daily Worker, ” to work as an ordinary working man in a factory and thus amid labour surroundings to acquire a first-hand education and experience of all phases of economic and political life in the Soviet Republic. He is entering into this self-imposed exile in order to equip himself the most thoroughly to carry out the principles of the Kuomintang.”[1] Feng, indeed, wanted to “equip himself most thoroughly” with the goods to be found in Soviet arsenals, and on his arrival at the Soviet capital he found that the open sesame to these riches was a simpler formula than the Lord’s Prayer. He had himself and his henchman, Yu Yu-jen, photographed in the centre of admiring Russian comrades. He predicted “new battles and new victories awaiting the future of the Chinese nation.” Before very long he learned to call “special attention to the labour and peasant movement taking place throughout China” and to declare his conviction that “in the future the proletariat will ultimately gain a victory in China.” On August 19, 1926, in an interview with Pravda, Feng promised that his army would fight “for the emancipation of the nation “ and “the consummation of the national revolution.”[2]
Although he had re-named his army the “Kuominchun” or “People’s Army,” the wily Feng had for years evaded friends who importuned him to throw in his lot with the Kuomintang, “but when he visited Moscow,” marvelled a Japanese journalist, “the Christian General allowed himself to be a disciple of Lenin before anyone was aware of it.”[3] It was immensely easy, pleasant—and profitable. Delighted with his conquest, Stalin plied Feng with arms and funds and shipped him back to his army, which had already started on a long trek southward from Nankow Pass through Shensi province toward the Honan border. Back among his soldiers, Feng proclaimed on September 17, 1926 : “I am the son of a labourer,” and announced that it would henceforth be the object of his armies “to awake the masses ... sweep away the traitorous military clans, break down imperialism, and secure the freedom and independence of China.”[4] Feng was now a full-fledged recruit in the ranks of Stalin’s reliable allies and stepped boldly along the path already trod by Hu Han-min, Chiang Kai-shek, Li Chi-sen, Tang Sheng-chih, and Wang Ching-wei. Secure behind the mountains in his great north-western territory, Feng acquired huge stocks of Russian arms and ammunition, entrenched himself at Tungkwan Pass, overlooking the Honan Plain, listened politely to his Russian advisers, and waited for “der Tag.”
It was not long in coming. While he waited, the Northern Expedition swept to the Yangtze. Chiang Kai-shek, who had earlier learned how easy it was to unlock the doors to Russian arsenals, entered Shanghai and there broke, not his faith with Stalin, but Stalin’s faith in him. Tang Sheng-chih and Wang Ching-wei were by now also preparing to break, but this was not yet officially admitted in Moscow, for the necessary scapegoat had not yet been selected—and there was still Feng. He, surely, would come like Lochinvar out of his western stronghold and save the day for the “revolutionary Kuomintang!” He was a solid man, closer to the soil, more deeply rooted in it than the thin reeds Moscow had until now leaned upon. Was he not, even now, reiterating by wire his undying fealty to Wuhan? [5] News dispatches reaching Moscow indicating that Feng was in touch with Chiang Kai-shek’s emissaries, that Feng would force Wuhan to terms with Chiang, were kept out of the Russian Press and elsewhere hotly denied.
“Recently the imperialists have again been circulating rumours that Chiang Kai-shek would be reconciled with Wuhan or that he would collaborate with Feng Yu-hsiang. This is false,” declared the central organ of the Comintern. “None of the leaders has any connection with Chiang Kai-shek. Feng Yu-hsiang and his army have no confidence in this traitor either ...”[6] Feng was Moscow’s last trump. To suggest that he would fall down on the job was the rankest Trotskyist heresy, for was not Trotsky warning, once more, that to put faith in Feng meant to court a repetition of the experiment with Chiang Kai-shek? [7]
Wuhan, too, counted, almost piteously, on Feng Yu-hsiang. Wuhan, it will be recalled, had decided to move northward against the Fengtien troops rather than against Chiang Kaishek, in the hope that a military victory and the occupation of Peking would bring Chiang to heel. The success of this plan rested decisively with Feng Yu-hsiang, sitting tight with his fresh forces back of Tungkwan Pass. In the first part of May the flower of the Kuomintang army had accordingly been moved up the railway into Honan. Led by the famous “Ironsides,” it fought its way northward in a series of sanguinary battles which culminated at the end of the month in a Chinese Armageddon on the fields north of Chumiatien. Behind the lines in Hankow workers toiled at the arsenal for thirteen, fifteen, and seventeen hours a day. Over their heads fluttered banners: “You are the rearguard of the revolution ... Unless you Bive your all, there can be no army, no revolution, no struggle to free China from its oppressors ... Our revolutionary soldiers do not fight in eight-hour shifts. Do you want to work only eight hours?”[8] At the front the soldiers, too, thought they were fighting “to free China from oppressors.” With unexampled heroism they hurled themselves at the better-fed, better-armed armies of the Northerners, commanded by Chang Hsueh-liang, the young son of Chang Tso-lin. The Fengtien forces were routed, but the victors paid with the destruction of their best forces. They lost 14,000 killed and wounded.[9] The men fought as men had rarely ever fought before in China because they were animated by the hope that in fighting and dying they were helping to put an end to the hated poverty and degradation of their own people. Their sacrifice was futile. They had been sent into battle not for these ends, but to feed the Napoleonic ambitions of Tang Sheng-chih and the hopes of the Wuhan leaders that they could force Chiang Kai-shek to come to terms. These, too, were frustrated. Wuhan had put up the stakes, the flower of its army. It was Feng Yu-hsiang who raked in the winnings.
Feng had remained carefully aloof during the fighting. He now moved down from Tungkwan Pass along the Lunghai railway. Scarcely losing a man, he occupied Loyang and by June 1 was ensconced in new headquarters at Kaifeng. The rout of Fengtien and the decimation of Hankow’s armies made him military arbiter of Central China. The march on to Peking depended entirely upon him. As if to underline that fact, he sent telegrams announcing his “victory” with fine impartiality both to Nanking and to Wuhan. The Wuhan leaders he summoned to Chengchow for a conference on June 12. Here they came in a body to learn their fate. Feng waited until the Wuhan party had arrived at Chengchow before coming down the line to meet them. Miss Strong watched Feng alight, “with ostentatious simplicity,” from a freight-car, which he used because his “brother soldiers also travel in freight-cars.” She related that “a long time afterward” she heard that Feng had entered the freight-car at the last station before Chengchow, having travelled thus far in a comfortable private car on the same train.[10] Advocates of a bloc with class enemies and dubious allies might have pondered the fact that only a year before Feng had arrived in Moscow in a political freight-car decorated with the name of the Chinese proletariat. Now, “a long time afterward,” they were about to learn that he had only temporarily left his own, more comfortable private car labelled: “Reserved for the Chinese bourgeoisie.”
When Feng gathered together with the group of Wuhan leaders, he found himself in agreement on one thing only: the workers, peasants, and Communists had to be crushed. “Even the Wuhan Government had decided this,” adds our lady reporter plaintively.[11] Beyond this, Feng wanted no more truck with Wuhan. He wanted strong allies from whom he could filch advantages, not weaklings from whom he had nothing further to pain. After the formalities of feasting were over and Wuhan had endowed Feng and his principal henchmen with titles to grace his military grip on Honan (from which Wuhan had already voluntarily withdrawn all its political workers),[12] Feng brought the conference to an abrupt close and sent his “allies” packing back to Hankow. “All the forces under Feng Yu-hsiang are pledged to obey the resolutions and orders of the Central Executive Committee at Wuhan and of the Nationalist Government,” hopefully reported the People’s Tribune .[13]
A week later, accompanied by Ku Meng-yu and Hsu Chien, two Wuhan luminaries,[14] Feng Yu-hsiang travelled down to the eastern terminus of the Lunghai railway, Hsuchow, and there met Chiang Kai-shek, with whom he struck an immediate bargain. On June 22 at the Hsuchow station, Feng told eager newspapermen “of his sincere desire to co-operate with the Nationalists and to extirpate militarism and Communism,”[15] and handed them a copy of a telegram he had sent to the leaders of the Wuhan Government.
“When I met you gentlemen in Chengchow,” it read, “we talked of the oppression of the merchants and other members of the gentry, of labour oppressing factory owners, and farmers oppressing landowners. The people (sic) wish to suppress this form of despotism. We also talked of the remedies for this situation. The only solution which we discussed is, as I see it, as follows: Borodin, who has already resigned, should return to his own country immediately. Secondly, those members of the Central Executive Committee of the Hankow regime who wish to go abroad for rest should be allowed to do so. Others may join the Nationalist Government at Nanking if they desire ... Both Nanking and Hankow, I believe, understand their mutual problems. I do not need to remind you gentlemen that our country is facing a severe crisis. But in view of this I feel constrained to insist that the present is a good time to unite the Nationalist faction in a fight against our common enemies. It is my desire that you accept the above solution and reach a conclusion immediately.”[16]
Lochinvar had fallen down on the job.
On the way back from Chengchow, General Galen,[The name used in China by Vassily Bluecher, later commander of the Far Eastern Red Army of the U.S.S.R.] chief Russian military adviser and the real organizer of the Northern Expedition, pointed out from the train some barely distinguishable shapes hugging the ground beneath the trees and in the gullies. These “were the bodies of Cantonese who had died advancing by this pass and railway. It was for this that they had died ... boys of Kwangtung and Hunan who had marched forth for a hope that most of them were only beginning to understand. It was for this only—that . . their allies who survived might establish a military dictatorship based upon the joint suppression of the workers and peasants.”[17]
To come to terms as swiftly as possible with this military dictatorship was now the sole purpose of the Wuhan leaders. At Chengchow they had understood that further collaboration with Feng Yu-hsiang depended upon their ability to disembarrass themselves of the Communists and to put an end to the mass movement. The Feng-Chiang conference at Hsuchow and Feng’s ultimatist telegram bade them hasten.
Wang Ching-wei “at once got to work, preparing for the immediate expulsion of the Communists.”[18] Tang Shengchih made his hurried trip to Hunan and there, as we have already seen, he “confirmed the existence of the Communist conspiracy against the Kuomintang “and advised” the immediate expulsion of the Communists from the Kuomintang.”[19] In the Press and from public platforms, the Kuomintang leaders opened up a campaign against the Communists to prepare the way for the contemplated split.
Ironically enough, the surge of the mass movement, its tendency to act independently of the Wuhan Government, its defiance of Wuhan’s restrictive decrees, were all laid at the door of the Communist Party. Before long the Comintern was going to charge the Chinese Communist leaders with sabotaging its instructions by failing to lead and develop this independence of the mass movement. Yet in these days, it is significant and instructive to note, Wang Ching-wei quoted approvingly from Stalin and the resolutions of the Comintern as an argument against the “extremists” in Hunan, the rank-and-file workers and peasants and individual Communists.
In a speech at the Hupeh party delegates’ conference at Wuchang on June 26, Wang cited the resolution of the Seventh Plenum of the E.C.C.I. “which clearly stated (that) the Chinese Revolution must take its stand on the alliance of the workers and peasants and small capitalists. In view of this fact,” said Wang, “members of the Chinese Communist Party itself viewed with disapproval the inconsiderate acts which were recently perpetrated, for example, in Hunan province.”[20]
In other words, as Wang saw it, those Communist leaders who “disapproved” the “excesses” of the peasants did so in conformity with, not in defiance of, the instructions of the Communist International! To show how “different” China was from Russia in respect to the problems of the social revolution, Wang quoted “Stalin’s admirable comparison “[21]between the China of 1927 and the Russia of 1905 and 1917, a comparison Stalin had drawn in order to refute and deride Trotsky’s argument that Soviets were needed to carry the Chinese agrarian revolt through to its conclusion.[“Can it be stated that the situation in Russia in March–June, 1917, was analogous to the present situation in China?” asked Stalin, at the May plenum. “No, it cannot. This cannot be maintained, not only because Russia was then on the threshold of a proletarian revolution, while China is now facing the bourgeois-democratic revolution, but also because the Provisional Government of Russia was then a counter-revolutionary government whilst the present Hankow Government is a revolutionary government in the bourgeois democratic meaning of that word ... The history of the workers’ Soviets tells us that such Soviets can exist and develop only in the event of favourable conditions for the direct transition from the bourgeois-democratic to the proletarian revolution. Was it not because just of this that the workers’ Soviets in Leningrad and Moscow in 1905 came to grief, like the workers’ Soviets in Germany in 1918—because conditions were not favourable? It is possible that in 1905 there would have been no Soviets in Russia had there existed at that time in Russia a broad organization similar to the present-day Left Kuomintang in China ... It follows that the Left Kuomintang in China is playing approximately the same role in the present Chinese bourgeois democratic revolution as the Soviets played in 1905.”—J. Stalin, “The Revolution in China and the Tasks of the C.I., ” Communist International, June 30, 1927.] Wang Ching-wei found common ground with Stalin in his argument against the nameless leaders of the mass movement, whose views, as he quoted them, sounded strangely like lines out of Trotsky’s speeches.
“I have heard frequently from those who are conducting the mass movement,” wrote Wang Ching-wei, “the saying: ‘Don’t place your confidence in the strength of the Kuomintang or the Nationalist Government. Place confidence in yourself.’ ... As a result the people have refused to accept orders or follow the instructions of the Government or Party (Kuomintang). It has not only alienated the people from the Party, but has also placed the people in the precarious position of conducting an independent war with the counter-revolutionaries without the direction of the Party ... As a consequence the masses have been surrounded by counter-revolutionaries and the Party has found it impossible to rescue them.”[22]
The masses conducted “an independent war” against the counter-revolutionaries, among whom they counted the landlords first and above all. The Kuomintang could not “rescue” the peasants because it was primarily interested in rescuing the landlords. The peasants suffered defeat, not because they ignored the leadership of the Kuomintang, but because the leadership of the Comintern and the Communist Party ignored them to preserve the alliance with the Kuomintang.
“The principle that every peasant should have his own field to plough is indeed clearly stipulated in the third of the Three People’s Principles,” Wang Ching-wei continued. ”But I must point out that when our Tsung (Sun Yat-sen) drew up the min sheng principle (people’s livelihood) and made the statement that ‘every peasant should have his own field to plough,’ he at the same time ... said clearly that the land questions should be settled through political and legal channels. He never said that the matter could be settled by taking the lands from the landowners and dividing them among the peasants.”
Sun Yat-sen, said Wang, wanted the problem “to be worked out in such a way that the peasants will be benefited and at the same time the landowners will not suffer.” Sun’s idea, went on, was that there would be no class struggle at all in China and that the Kuomintang’s job “as a Party of many classes of people” was to avoid this class struggle—”otherwise an alliance between the classes is impossible.” [23]
In his own way, Wang was right. If you were going to have what Stalin called “a revolutionary parliament,” or what Bukharin called a “cross between party and Soviets,” or what Martinov more simply dubbed the” bloc of four classes,” you had to keep the collaborating classes from clashing with each other. Otherwise an alliance was, in truth, impossible. Stalin-Bukharin wanted the class struggle in words and tried to avoid it in deeds. At this point they broke with the workers and peasants, who were not sure of the words, but who per-formed, with all the sure instincts of the oppressed, the deeds. The only common ground the peasant saw with the landlord was the land which be tilled and whence the landlord drew the profit. His aim in life had become to drive the landlord off that land and make it his own. These were the simple materials of the agrarian revolution. You were either with the peasant or with the landlord. Wang Ching-wei and his friends were now being compelled to swallow all their proud words about the land and the peasant and to place themselves unequivocally with those who were already crushing the revolt on the land.
Stalin had made it the task of the Chinese Communists to strengthen the connection between the masses and the Wuhan Government, “the only governmental authority,” the “organizing centre of the revolution.” Yet in China the masses were coming more and more sharply into collision with this Government because, Stalin to the contrary notwithstanding, this Government did not support but resisted their efforts in their own behalf. The mass organizations went their own way as best they could. “The gulf between the Government and the masses is now wide,” reported a special Kuomintang commission sent to investigate conditions in the province of Kiangsi. “The Government cannot even participate in or supervise the activities of the public organizations ... Very often we see the districts neglecting the direction of the provincial Kuomintang, or the peasant and labour unions opposing the resolutions of the provincial Kuomintang ... The Party branches have made arrests and punished people freely. Public organizations did the same thing. Thus everywhere there have been the phenomena of multiple governments—this is just as dangerous as anarchy ... The greatest fault of the peasant and labour movement leaders is their misunderstanding of the policy: ‘Support the interests of the peasants and labourers.’ “[24]
The worker and peasant leaders misunderstood the slogan: “Support the interests of the peasants and labourers.” They thought it meant to support the interests of the peasants and labourers. Their efforts to do this led them to the creation of “multiple governments.” Isolated and scattered in the towns and villages, the local unions of the workers and peasants collided at every point with the district and provincial centres of the Kuomintang and with the “organizing centre” at Wuhan. These “multiple governments” completely lacked connection with each other. They were unable to pursue a uniform policy. The organizations of workers’, peasants’, and soldiers’ councils, rapidly establishing contact with each other, from village to village, town to town, from province to province, offered the only means of overcoming the chaotic disorganization of the mass movement. But these would have been Soviets. Stalin opposed this course, urged by Trotsky, on the grounds that it meant “struggle against the revolutionary Kuomintang,” against the “only governmental authority.” The Left Kuomintang leaders in Hankow opposed it too, and for precisely the same reasons and in exactly the same terms.
In an article entitled “Revolution and the Masses,” Sun Fo complained that the masses had proved indifferent to Wuhan’s ban on the assumption of civil power by the mass organizations. “Two months have elapsed since these instructions were issued,” he wrote. “Various public organizations have continued their free actions in open disregard of the Government’s decisions, aiming at depredation of the power of the Government.” Peasants were seizing the land, workers were taking over factories and shops, he complained. “We must call attention to the fact that if the masses are not following the leadership and direction of the Kuomintang and are not prepared to carry out the policy of the Party, they are actually acting against the interests of the national revolutionary movement (read: “the revolutionary Kuomintang”). In other words, they are actually committing counter-revolutionary actions.”
“If the people can freely arrest, impose fines, confiscate the property of individuals, and carry out executions right under the nose of the Government,” Sun Fo went on, “then the political power of the Government must be regarded as completely usurped. There is no prestige nor power. On the other hand, if the people regard their actions as proper, then they have openly refused to take the Nationalist Government as the only governing organ of the revolutionary movement and the Government of the national revolution. They are under the impression that the Nationalist Government can no longer enforce its authority and so they must form independent administrative organs ... In opposing openly the revolutionary Government, their actions can be taken as being of a counter-revolutionary character ... They refuse to admit that all mass movements in China should be directed and unified under the Kuomintang. They believe the Communist Party should take part in leading mass movements. They have not yet been convinced that the Nationalist Government is the only representative organ of the revolutionary movement.”[25]
It is doubtful whether Sun Fo in Hankow in July, 1927, had read the theses and speeches of Stalin made a few weeks earlier in Moscow. It is certain that he never saw or heard the arguments of Trotsky. Yet here he might have been plagiarizing directly from Stalin. Substitute “Trotsky” or the “Opposition” for the “masses” and Sun Fo’s article might just as well have been a document of the Stalin-Bukharin majority at the Eighth Plenum. The Chinese workers and peasants, and Trotsky, rejected the Stalin-Sun Fo dictum that the Wuhan Government was the “only governmental authority,” “the only governing organ of the revolutionary movement.” The masses were convinced that Wuhan could not “enforce its authority” and demanded the creation of “independent administrative organs,” just as Trotsky in Moscow warned that Wuhan’s power “was nothing or nearly nothing” and demanded the creation of Soviets, independent councils of the workers, peasants, and soldiers. For this Stalin denounced Trotsky as “counter-revolutionary” and for this his confrère Sun Fo levelled the same charge, more openly, more directly, against the masses themselves. These affinities were not at all accidental.
Prior to striking at the mass movement at Canton in March, 1926, and at Shanghai in April, 1927, Chiang Kai-shek had laid down a barrage directed at the Communists, charging them with responsibility for the “excesses” of the masses and with plotting against the sovereignty of the bourgeoisie within the Kuomintang. The leaders of the Left Kuomintang now pursued the same tactics. The accusation was no more just now than it had been at Canton or Shanghai. Nothing was further from the minds of the Communist leadership, in Hankow, or in Moscow, than the unleashing of an independent offensive of the masses directed against the sabotage and betrayal of the petty bourgeois leaders of the Kuomintang. On June 29, that is when the Wuhan leaders were already openly taking sides with the militarists against the agrarian revolution, the central organ of the Communist International issued a programmatic article which asked “Who will realize the agrarian revolution?” and answered: “By its historic past, its social composition and the perspectives of its development, the Kuomintang can and must be transformed into an organ of the democratic dictatorship ... The Kuomintang is a sort of cross between a party and a national parliament ...
“Soviets will be necessary at the moment when the revolution will be nearing the achievement of its bourgeois-democratic tasks,” the Comintern spokesman continued. “At that moment it will be possible and perhaps (?) necessary to split the Kuomintang. This moment cannot be foreseen with precision. Nevertheless, it is clear that it is not close enough for it to be necessary to advance immediately among the masses the slogan of Soviets. The Communist International and the Communist Party of China are now responsible for the fate of the Kuomintang, and of the Wuhan Government, in other words, for the fate of the Chinese revolution. They cannot therefore permit themselves to issue loose slogans and formulas.
“The best illustration of the nonsense of the arch-Left line of the Opposition is in the slogan for soldiers’ deputies as one of the forms of the dual power. In proclaiming these slogans the Bolsheviks sought to decompose the army of the Czar and of Kerensky. To proclaim it now for the army fighting for the Wuhan Government would be consciously to seek to decompose this army ... To proclaim the slogan of Soviets of soldiers’ deputies would be consciously to accelerate the conflict with the generals in the most disadvantageous circumstances for the Communist Party and its allies. This slogan would mean provoking a conflict which could really cause a lasting defeat for the revolution.”[26]
In Hankow the same spirit necessarily dominated the Chinese Communist leaders who clung now to two forlorn hopes, that by retreating still further and conceding still more, they might still preserve the “united front” and, secondly, that by playing on the strings of this or that militarist’s ambitions, they might still be able to divert Wuhan in the direction of a punitive expedition against Chiang Kai-shek. They raised the slogan of an “Eastern Expedition” against Nanking, thinking “to fool the ‘revolutionary generals‘ into attacking Chiang first and the Communists later,” according to a member of the Communist Central Committee.[27] Meetings were staged and manifestoes issued. Appeals were made to the generals believed to be more “reliable.” Chang Fah-kwei, commander of the “Ironsides,” was most bitter against Chiang Kai-shek and for a while Communist hopes centred in him. Roy went to Wang Ching-wei and tried to persuade him, in the spirit of Stalin’s telegram, to permit the expansion of Communist forces under Chang Fah-kwei’s command. Roy found Wang cold to his proposal.[28] Representatives of the Shanghai General Labour Union wired an appeal to Feng Yu-hsiang on the same day that the latter was demanding at Chengchow the extermination of all trade union leaders: “We hope that you, who are the true believer in Kuomintang principles and the real supporter of ... the policies of the Tsungli, will lead ... the revolutionary armies for a punitive expedition against Chiang Kai-shek.”[29] All the agitation for a campaign against Chiang was coupled to very fervent demands for continued “co-operation” between the two parties,[30] for everyone already understood that the expulsion of the Communists impended. Wang Ching-wei and Chang Fah-kwei did favour an expedition against Chiang, but only because their own political fortunes required his elimination. Chang actually started moving some of his troops towards Nanking a short while later, but the campaign fizzled into nothing. “We will not fight Chiang Kai-shek for the Communists,” sneered Ho Chien and the other generals.[31]
The panic-stricken Central Committee of the Communist Party decided to issue a manifesto to the effect that if the Kuomintang “really” wanted to carry out the policies of Sun Yat-sen, it had to fight Chiang Kai-shek and it had to ally with the Communists. But when the members of the Political Bureau got together for a meeting, every man present offered a different draft and no agreement could be reached on the terms of the proposed declaration. Finally on June 20 an enlarged meeting of the Central Committee adopted a statement embodying eleven points—the last desperate attempt to convince the “revolutionary Kuomintang” that the Communists were prepared to keep faith with the “national united front.” The most important of the eleven points follow:
”4. The Kuomintang, since it is the bloc of the workers, peasants, and petty bourgeoisie opposed to imperialism, is naturally in the leading position of the national revolution.
5. Communist members of the Kuomintang, although participating in government work, both central and local, are participating as members of the Kuomintang and not as members of the Communist Party ... The Communist members now in the Government may ask leave in order to reduce the difficulties of the political situation.
6. The workers’ and peasants’ mass organizations should accept the leadership and control of the Kuomintang. The demands of the workers’ and peasants’ mass movement should be in accordance with the resolutions of the Kuomintang congresses, the decisions of the Central Executive Committee, and the decrees and laws of the Government. But the Kuomintang should also protect the organizations of the workers and peasants and their interests, also in accordance with the Party resolutions and Government decrees.
7. According to Kuomintang principles, the masses must be armed. But the armed groups of the workers and peasants should submit to the regulation and training of the Government. In order to avoid political troubles, the present armed pickets at Wuhan can be reduced or incorporated into the army.
8. The labour unions and workers’ pickets may not assume judicial or administrative functions, arrest people, try them, or patrol the streets, without the permission of the tangpu or the Government.
9. Shop employees’ unions should be organized by the tangpu jointly with the men sent by the General Labour Union. The economic demands of the shop employees shall not exceed the economic capacities of the shopkeepers. The unions shall not interfere with the right of employment or the shopkeeper’s right to hire and fire. They shall not insult the shopkeepers with arrests, fines, putting on of dunce caps, etc.”[32]
The Chinese Communist Party was making its last effort to obey Stalin’s instructions, ”to strengthen the authority of the revolutionary Government and its role as the organizing centre of the revolution.” When 400 delegates gathered that same week at Hankow to represent 3,000,000 organized workers in eight provinces at the Fourth National Labour Conference, it dared not seize the opportunity thus offered to make a sharp turn and begin the mobilization of the workers against the offensive of the Kuomintang reaction.
When Wang Ching-wei appeared on the conference platform on June 23, he was loudly cheered.[33] Nevertheless the delegates repeatedly struck a note of determination to struggle for the interests of the labour movement as such.[34] Even Lozovsky, present as a fraternal delegate of the Russian trade unions, had to make an unusually “radical” speech.[35] “Counterrevolution is gaining strength every day,” said the manifesto of the conference, adopted on June 28. “In the territory of the Nationalist Government, the labour movement can only be conducted openly at Wuhan. Counter-revolutionaries are now in power in Hunan, Kiangsi, and Honan ... Labourers are still suffering under a new kind of tyrannical rule. Under these circumstances, it is possible for the reactionaries to dominate Wuhan some day. We must struggle hard to maintain the existence of the labour unions. We are now in a reign of white terror.”[36] This, however, did not prevent the manifesto from concluding: “Long Live the Nationalist Government!”
“Here labour is in a free atmosphere,” said the People’s Tribune. “The heavy hand of unsympathetic or actively antagonistic militarists is absent here. Organized labour in Nationalist China is loyal to the Wuhan Government because it is only under this Government that it can confidently count upon holding on to labour’s first and most vital right—to work in the open ... unafraid and fearless.”[37]
Yet on the morning of June 30, the final session had barely ended with the shouting of the slogan, “Long Live the Nationalist Government!” when the “heavy hand of antagonistic militarists” descended sharply and directly on the trade union headquarters. Soldiers marched in and began to loot and destroy the property and records of the All-China Trade Union Federation. Panting protests were made. The offending soldiers were ordered withdrawn. They had acted a little too prematurely. The omnipresent Miss Strong caught Hsu Chao-jen as he raced past her street. She asked him if the recalcitrant soldiers would be punished. “He smiled wearily. He was glad enough to get the building. ‘We have it to work in to-day ... Who knows what will happen to-morrow?’ he replied.”[38] The federation never did get its building back.
The raid on the union headquarters had followed the announcement that the workers’ pickets were being voluntarily disarmed and dissolved. In Shanghai the order had been given to “hide or bury” all arms in hopes of averting the impending blow. In Hankow the Central Committee decided to surrender completely the small stock of arms the workers had and to dissolve the picket forces in advance. On June 29 a delegation of the Hupeh General Labour Union, headed by Hsiang Chung-fah, went to the office of the Kuomintang military council and “stated that in view of the complaints that union pickets were a factor in the reluctance on the part of business men to restore normal economic conditions, they wished to offer either to deliver their arms or to be incorporated in the army. It was later decided that they should voluntarily surrender their arms ...”[39]
“It has been stated that as long as the pickets were armed, the business men did not feel safe in resuming business,” explained the People’s Tribune . “Other rumours have been circulated that the pickets were contemplating an attack on the soldiers. In order to aid the Government policy and to silence these rumours, the Hupeh General Labour Union decided that the pickets should be disarmed. It was felt that in this way an obstacle to the resumption of business must be removed and also that attempts to alienate workers and soldiers would be circumvented.”[40]
Next day the Hupeh General Labour Union issued a further explanatory statement: “For the purpose of consolidating the united front of the troops and labourers, and in order not to give grounds to support the charges made by reactionaries and counter-revolutionaries, the union ordered the dissolution of the armed pickets on the 28th inst. Arms and ammunition were handed to the Hankow office of the Wuhan garrison for custody ... We have petitioned the Government for protection in order to show our sincere intention to support it ... As to the reactionaries, we hope the Government will mete out strong measures for their punishment.”[41]
The Communist Central Committee had also authorized the Communists in the Government “to ask leave in order to reduce the difficulties of the political situation.” Accordingly on June 30 Tang Ping-shan, the Communist Minister of Agriculture, petitioned the Government for “leave of absence,” apologizing for his failure “to put the peasant movement on the right track.”
“Ever since I assumed office as Minister of Agriculture,” he wrote, “I have tried my best to perform the important duty of improving peasant conditions. I have consistently done my best to set the peasant movement right. Recent developments have made the political situation so serious that to put the peasant movement on the right track has been too heavy a responsibility for me. Since I am physically unfit to go on with my work, I request leave of absence.”[42] Hsu Chao-jen, Communist Minister of Labour, had long since ceased attending to his office. His letter of resignation, stating that “owing to recent developments in the situation, I can no longer remain in office,” was made public a few days later.[43] Hsiang Chung-fah and other Communists who held posts in the Hupeh provincial Government had already withdrawn. Panic and demoralization were complete. The Central Committee itself fled across the river to Wuchang. It had done all it could to “strengthen the authority of the organizing centre of the revolution.” All to no avail, for the decision to expel the Communists had already been made and remained only to be formally adopted at the session of the Kuomintang Political Council on July 15.
It had begun to dawn on Chen Tu-hsiu that the only course left open was complete withdrawal from the Kuomintang. He consulted with Borodin. “I quite agree with your idea,” said the High Adviser, “but I know that Moscow will never permit it.”[44] But in reality Borodin did not agree at all. He was still trying to pump “steadfastness and revolutionary purpose” into the rabbit. According to Tang Leang-li, Borodin had been regarded ever since the Changsha events as merely “an honoured guest, no longer ... a trusted adviser.”[45] Borodin clung fast to the honour of Kuomintang hospitality. He was still probing for “possibilities” of cooperation he might have overlooked. Chiu Chiu-pei says he toyed with the idea of leading Soong Ching-ling (Mrs. Sun Yat-sen), Teng Yen-ta, and Eugene Chen out of the Government as a demonstrative act against Wang Ching-wei.[46] But events had already rolled over Borodin’s head. The Communist leadership had fallen apart and all but dissolved. The rank and file of the Party were scattered and demoralized. Ho Chien’s troops had already saddled Wuhan and were riding it their own way. One by one union headquarters were occupied. Arrests were made and executions began to take place. The tide of terror was engulfing Stalin’s “revolutionary centre.” The Izvestia correspondent wired that yesterday’s reliable allies had to-day become “playthings in the hands of the generals.”[47] The rats began to quit the sinking ship.
On July 6 Bukharin suddenly and desperately advised the Chinese masses that they had to rely on themselves alone: “One of the chief slogans must be: ‘Workers and peasants! Trust in your own forces alone! Do not trust the generals and officers! Organize your armed troops!‘ ... Feng Yu-hsiang has gone over to the camp of the opponents of the people’s revolution. We must declare merciless war upon him!” Yet Bukharin was still ready to place his trust in Wang Ching-wei: “The friends of Chiang Kai-shek are ready to accept this plan (to expel the Communists)—Wang Ching-wei is not among them. He is firmer than the others,” [48] he added hopefully between parentheses. Less than a week later he discovered that Wang Ching-wei was “firmer than the others” only in his determination to smash the mass movement. Bukharin now proclaimed that “an abrupt turn in the Chinese Revolution” had taken place and solemnly declared that “the revolutionary role of Wuhan is at an end.” In a menacing paragraph at the end of the Eighth Plenum resolution and in some of his subsequent articles, Bukharin had already prepared his exit. Responsibility for the debacle, he now declared, lay with the Chinese Communist leadership which “in recent times obstinately sabotaged the decisions of the Comintern ... (it) has not stood the fiery test ... it has suffered shipwreck.”[49]
“The revolutionary role of the Wuhan Government is played out; it is becoming a counter-revolutionary force,” announced a resolution of the Executive Committee of the Communist International on July 14.[50] “This is the new and peculiar feature which the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party and all the Chinese comrades must fully and clearly take into account.”
The Comintern had foreseen and foretold everything. On July 14 it discovered a “new and peculiar” fact which had been known to the simplest Hunan peasant or Wuhan worker for months. Does that mean any mistakes had been made? Not in Moscow! Stalin had not made a mistake, or hardly any, since Lenin died.
“The support given to the Northern Expedition (i.e. to Chiang Kai-shek) was perfectly correct so long as it aroused a revolutionary mass movement. And the support given to Wuhan was equally correct so long as it acted as the opponent of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nanking Government. But this same tactic of blocs becomes fundamentally wrong in the moment at which the Wuhan Government capitulates to the enemies of the revolution. What was correct during the previous stage of the revolution is now absolutely unsuitable.”
But the Northern Expedition was the expedition of the bourgeoisie to the Yangtze, where its victories and the Communist policy of retreat enabled Chiang Kai-shek to slaughter the workers and destroy their organizations. That was when his “revolutionary role” ended. It is “perfectly correct” to form blocs with class enemies, but such blocs become “fundamentally wrong” and “absolutely unsuitable” only at the precise moment when your enemy grabs you by the throat. To have mobilized against him in advance, not in words but in deeds, to have armed yourself against the literal certainty of his attack would have been—counter-revolutionary Trotskyism.
“All this involves certain difficulties for the leadership of the Party, especially in the case of so young and inexperienced a party as the Communist Party of China ... The acute tension of the revolutionary situation requires a rapid grasp of the features peculiar to each moment. It requires skilful and timely manoeuvres, rapid adaptation to slogans ... and the decided rupture of blocs which have ceased to be factors of the revolutionary struggle, and have become obstacles in its way. If at a certain stage of development of the revolution the support of the Wuhan Government by the Communist Party was necessary, such support at present would be disastrous to the Communist Party of China, and would plunge it into the bog of opportunism.”
To-day, July 14, the “factors of the revolutionary struggle” have suddenly and abruptly become “obstacles in its way.” Only now, on July 14, with the Communist Party routed and demoralized, the masses smashed and hurled back from all their positions, it has become “disastrous” to continue supporting Wuhan. Up to their necks in the “bog of opportunism,” because from the very beginning they had supported Wuhan and before that Chiang Kai-shek, the Chinese Communists might truly have wondered what the E.C.C.I. visualized when it used the word “disastrous.” What had become of the “revolutionary centre” and the “need for strengthening the authority of the organizing centre of the revolution” outlined by the E.C.C.I. only six weeks before? Moscow had an answer for that too. Wuhan had been trans-formed from a “revolutionary centre” into a “counterrevolutionary force” because:
“In spite of the advice given by the Comintern, the heads of the Kuomintang have not only failed to support the agrarian revolution but have unfettered the hands of its enemies. They have sanctioned the disarmament of the workers, the punitive expeditions against the peasants, and the reprisals of Tang Sheng-chih and Co. They have postponed and sabotaged the campaign against Nanking under various pretexts.”
All this had come about because Wuhan spurned Moscow’s “advice.” The rabbit just rolled over and died. While it lived it blushed pink under Moscow’s persistently amorous advances. But now that it was dead its coyness too disappeared. The pink faded into a bloated white, barely visible as the anaconda wrapped it away.
In Canton, Shanghai, Changsha, and finally now in Wuhan, the Chinese masses had seen the standard-bearers of the Kuomintang metamorphose from sterling allies of the revolution into cruel butchers of the workers and peasants. At each new catastrophe the Comintern announced that all had been properly foreseen and the policies pursued perfectly correct. Bukharin was continually discovering “new and peculiar features” in the Chinese Revolution, and he now castigated the Communist Party for being unable to carry through the rupture of “blocs which have become obstacles.” The bloc with the Wuhan Government was ended. This did not mean an end to the bloc with the Kuomintang. On this score the Comintern’s instructions gave unmistakable evidence of blind panic. The Comintern resolution called upon the Chinese Communists “to resign demonstratively from the Wuhan Government,” but “not to withdraw from the Kuomintang.” This was perhaps the newest and most peculiar feature of all.
“The Communists should remain in the Kuomintang, in spite of the campaign carried on by its leaders for the expulsion of the Communists. Closer contact with the mass of the members of the Kuomintang who should be induced to accept resolutions decidedly protesting against the actions of the C.E.C. of the Kuomintang, demanding the removal of the present leaders of the Kuomintang, and to make preparations on these lines for the Party Conference of the Kuomintang.”
Still flying the Kuomintang banner, the Communists were now “to intensify the work among the proletarian masses ... build up labour mass organizations ... strengthen the trade unions ... prepare the working classes for decisive action ... develop the agrarian revolution ... arm the workers and peasants ... organize a competent fighting illegal Party apparatus.”
But how to escape the past? ask the Chinese Communists. The great organizations we built have been smashed. Our comrades are being tortured, killed, and scattered. The mass movement has been destroyed and the workers and peasants rightly look upon us as men who deceived them and led them to the slaughter. We suppose that if you tell us to raise still higher the Kuomintang banner, we must do so; but we doubt whether the masses would follow us now even if we raised a banner of our own. Never mind all that, replies the Comintern. Your own leaders, not we, are responsible.
“... The E.C.C.I. considers it its revolutionary duty to call upon the members of the Communist Party of China openly to fight against the opportunism of the Central Committee ...
“Take measures to make good the opportunist errors of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China in order to render the leadership of the Party politically sound ... fight decisively against the opportunist deviations of the Party leaders ... change the character of the leadership ... disavow those leaders who have violated the international discipline of the Communist International.”
Stalin had acquitted himself of his “revolutionary duty.” It would henceforth be the “revolutionary duty” of all the Comintern scribblers to perpetuate the charge that the Chinese Communist leaders, hapless victims of their own gullibility and ignorance, were alone responsible for this immense historical catastrophe. Stalin and Bukharin, however, could impose upon the Chinese Communists a policy which shattered one of the greatest revolutionary mass movements of all time. They could not impose their will upon history by weaving dishonest resolutions. At Wuhan events took their final course. In accordance with Moscow’s instructions, the Communists demonstratively “withdrew” from the Government they had already left, announcing at the same time that they had “no reason to leave the Kuomintang or to refuse to co-operate with it” and that they would not permit (?) “the generals who have betrayed the revolution and the vacillating politicians to misuse the name of the Kuomintang and hide themselves under the banner of Sun Yat-sen.” [51] Unfrightened, the generals proceeded to “misuse” the name of the Kuomintang. On July 15 the Kuomintang Political Council ordered all Communist members of the Kuomintang to renounce their Communist Party membership. Four days later the Military Council ordered a similar purge throughout the army.” Punishment without leniency” was ordered for all recalcitrants.[52] Within a few days execution squads gave due emphasis to the expulsion order. Those Communists who refused to capitulate—and droves of them did—were compelled to flee. Chen Tu-hsiu, overcome by the utter hopelessness of his position, resigned from the chairmanship of the Central Committee.” The International,” he wrote,” wishes us to carry out our own policy on the one hand and does not allow us to withdraw from the Kuomintang on the other. There is really no way out and I cannot continue with my work.”[53] The remaining Communist leaders, Chiu Chiu-pei, Chang Kuo-tao, Li Li-san, Mao Tse-tung, and the others, stuffed Kuomintang flags into their pockets for future use and precipitately fled. On July 27 the leaders of the Left Kuomintang gathered at the railway station to bid farewell to their” honoured guest,” Borodin. He left nominally” to confer with Feng Yu-hsiang.”[54] Actually he was beginning a long trek across the north-west to the distant Soviet frontier, Moscow’s retreat from Hankow.
The military authorities proceeded with the systematic destruction of the trade unions. The Hankow Garrison Headquarters issued a ban on strikes. Between July 14 and 19 soldiers were” billeted” on the premises of twenty-five unions whose archives and effects were oonfiscated. Simultaneously throughout Honan province Feng Yu-hsiang was conducting a similar drive.[55] ” In the last few weeks the Chinese labour movement in the territory of the Wuhan Government has lived through a period of the most brazen reaction ... The military ... have carried out such enormous work of destruction directed against the mass organizations ... that it will require a very long period and gigantic energy to make good the losses and to enable the trade unions to resume their normal functions,” reported the Pan-Pacific Trade Union Secretariat. ”Many of the trade union leaders and organizers in the different provinces and districts ... have been driven out, arrested, or killed. The other leaders of the Chinese trade unions, among them the most prominent leaders of the All-China Trade Union Federation, were compelled to flee ... At a banquet to the delegates of the Pan-Pacific Trade Union Congress ... Wang Ching-wei declared eloquently that he considered the best guarantee for the success of the national revolution to be the development of the mass movement of the workers and peasants and the immediate realization of the basic demands of the toiling masses ... Now we not only hear different speeches and declarations, but we witness quite different actions toward the organizations of the workers and peasants, actions which until now were the exclusive privilege of all militarists and counter-revolutionists of the type of Chang Tso-lin and Chiang Kai-shek.”[56] On July 30, two thousand Hankow ricksha men stormed a police-station to force the release of an arrested comrade. Two of them were killed and six were wounded. Police sent a letter to the Ricksha Pullers’ Union to send representatives to a parley. But no one was there. The union leaders had fled. There were only the pullers in the streets on strike. Martial law was proclaimed and the death penalty instituted. The strike came to an end. It was the last open manifestation of the Hankow labour movement for a long time to come. A few days later Nanking and Wuhan were exchanging congratulatory telegrams. Nanking wired bouquets to Wuhan for its decisive action against the Communists and invited the leaders to Nanking. “If all feelings of aversion are resolutely given up ...” replied Wuhan on August 10, “your former measures devised to meet emergencies will be whole-heartedly excused by us all.”[57] Thus ended the “complete contradiction” between the “revolutionary centre” at Wuhan and counterrevolutionary Nanking—in an act of touching Christian forgiveness.
Of all the “Leftists” in Wuhan only Teng Yen-ta, and after him Soong Ching-ling, dissociated themselves publicly from the new course. “From Yang Yu-ting (Chang Tso-lin’s deputy) to Chiang Kai-shek ... all are either Kuomintang members or are going to become members. Kuomintang banners are hoisted everywhere. But is this not the same situation we faced in the 1911 revolution?” wrote Teng on July 6. “Is not all economic, political, and military power still in the hands of the militarists? ... We wanted to utilize the military, but we were being utilized by them.”[58] A week later Teng resigned as head of the Political Department of the Military Council. Even he saw far more clearly than the “revolutionists” in Moscow that a clean break was occurring between the masses and the Kuomintang. “Those who formerly advocated the full protection of the labourers and peasants have started to massacre them ...” he declared ... The revolutionary significance of the Kuomintang will be lost ... The natural result will be that the Party itself will become counter-revolutionary ... The revolution will be a failure, as it was in 1911.” [59]
Following Teng, Soong Ching-ling declared that the Kuomintang had become “a tool in the hands of this or that militarist. It will have ceased to be a living force working for the future welfare of the Chinese people, but will have become a machine, the agent of oppression, a parasite battening on the present enslaving system.”[60] Teng Yen-ta and Soong Ching-ling, together with Eugene Chen, fled into European exile. Thus ended the myth of the “Left Kuomintang.”[Only bitter personal rivalries remained. Chiang Kai-shek temporarily retired from Nanking to permit the unification with the Wuhan group to take place. After trying vainly for five years to displace Chiang, Wang Ching-wei finally became, in January, 1932, his minion, along with Sun Fo and all the other “Leftists.” After a few futile attempts at a come-back, Eugene Chen faded into obscurity. Teng Yen-ta returned from exile in 1930 and organized the so-called “Third Party” in opposition to the Kuomintang and the Communists. He was arrested in the French Concession at Shanghai and handed over to Chiang Kaishek who shot him. Soong Ching-ling was the last relic of the “Left Koumintang” to keep faith with the Comintern. After nearly ten years, during which she repeatedly denounced Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang as the butchers of the people, she was led by the Comintern back into Chiang Kai-shek’s fold, and to-day once more ardently supports him in the 1937 revival of the “nationalist united front,” making her peace with the “parasite battening on the present enslaving system.”]
The revolution which had swept China in three brief and kaleidoscopic years was at an end. The rising of a mighty people had caused the rotten structure of an ancient and outworn and oppressive civilization to totter. The masses had shown more than enough strength to topple it and for ever destroy it to its roots. But to-day that old society was settling back to its foundations and all the contradictions inherent within it were being renewed and deepened. For having tried to destroy it and for having aspired to the dignity of human beings, the workers and peasants of China were now paying a ghastly price. Over the prisons and execution grounds flew the banner of the Kuomintang. Under it the Chinese bourgeoisie had been enabled to ride to power. Under it the masses had risen and under it, uncomprehending, they had been struck down. Throughout the revolution that same banner had been tied to the flagstaff of the Communist International and to that flagstaff were lashed the Chinese Communists.
1 Daily Worker, New York, April 6, 1926.
2 Katsuji Fuse, Sovjet Policy in the Orient, pp. 322-6.
3 Ibid., p. 327.
4 Ibid., p. 329.
5 People’s Tribune, May 8, 1927.
6 La Correspondance Internationale, June 8, 1927.
7 Trotsky, Problems, pp. 123-4.
8 People’s Tribune, June 10, 1927.
9 Cf. “Detailed Story of Decisive Campaign in Honan,” People’s Tribune, June 19, 1927.
10 Strong, China’s Millions, p. 62; M. N. Roy, Revolution und Konterrevolution in China, Berlin, 1930, p. 363.
11 Strong, China’s Millions, p. 62 ff.; Fischer, Soviets in World Affairs, v. II, p. 669.
12 People’s Tribune, June 1927.
13 Ibid., June 13, 1927.
14 Roy, Revolution und Konterrevolution, pp. 363-4.
15 Chinese News Service, Canton, June 23, 1927.
16 “Marshal Feng Yu-hsiang’s Telegram to Hankow, June 21, 1927,” Nationalist China, issued by the Kuomintang Secretariat, Canton, May, 1927; see also China Weekly Review, July 2, 1927.
17 Strong, China’s Millions, p. 72.
18 Tang Leang-li, Inner History, pp. 283-4.
19 Ibid., p. 285.
20 People’s Tribune, June 29, 1927.
21 Ibid.
22 Wang Ching-wei, “The Party Must Lead the Mass Movement,” People’s Tribune, July 8, 1927.
23 Ibid.
24 “Report of the Special Kiangsi Commission,” People’s Tribune, July 13, 14, 15, 1927.
25 Sun Fo, “The Revolution and the Masses,” Chung Yang Jih Pao, Hankow, July 14, 1927.
26 N. Lenzner, “La Question Chinoise,” La Correspondance Internationale, June 29, 1927.
27 Chiu Chiu-pei, Chinese Revolution, p. 114.
28 Ibid.
29 People’s Tribune, June 15, 1927.
30 Cf. People’s Tribune, July 9, 1927.
31 Chiu Chiu-pei, Chinese Revolution, p. 115.
32 “August 7 Letter”; Chiu Chiu-pei, Chinese Revolution, p. 115 ff.
33 People’s Tribune, June 23, 1927.
34 Cf. Sz Toh-li, “The Fourth All-China Trade Union Congress,” Pan-Pacific Worker, Hankow, July 15, 1927.
35 “Speech of Lozovsky,” Pan-Pacific Worker, July 1, 1927.
36 “Manifesto of the Fourth Labour Conference,” People’s Tribune, June 29, 1927.
37 People’s Tribune, June 22, 1927.
38 Strong, China’s Millions, p. 88.
39 People’s Tribune, June 30, 1927.
40 Ibid.
41 Ibid., July 1, 1927.
42 Ibid., June 30, 1927.
43 Ibid. July 18, 1927.
44 Chen Tu-hsiu, Letter to the Comrades .
45 Tang Leang-li, Inner History, p. 280.
46 Chiu Chiu-pei, Chinese Revolution, p. 118.
47 International Press Correspondence, July 28, 1927.
48 N. Bukharin, “The Position of the Chinese Revolution,” International Press Correspondence, July 6, 1927.
49 N. Bukharin, “An Abrupt Turn in the Chinese Revolution,” International Press Correspondence, July 14, 1927.
50 “Resolution of the E.C.C.I. on the Present Situation of the Chinese Revolution,” International Press Correspondence July 28, 1927.
51 “Declaration of the Communist Party of China,” International Press Correspondence, August 4, 1927.
52 People’s Tribune, July 20, 26, 1927
53 Chen Tu-hsiu, Letter to the Comrades .
54 People’s Tribune, July 28, 1927.
55 Ibid., July 22, 23, 24, 1927.
56 Ibid., July 29, 1927.
57 Tang Leang-li, Inner History, p. 291.
58 Chung Yang Jih Pao, July 6, 1927.
59 People’s Tribune, July 14, 1927.
60 People’s Tribune, July 18, 1927; the text of Soong Ching-ling’s statement will also be found in Woo, Kuomintang and the Future of the Chinese Revolution, pp. 270-3.