How the Chinese Communist Party tried to turn war into revolution in Manchuria in 1929.
Further reading:
Bruce A. Elleman and Stephen Kotkin, eds., Manchurian Railways and the Opening of China
Michael M. Walker, The 1929 Sino-Soviet War
Chong-Sik Lee, Revolutionary Struggle in Manchuria: Chinese Communism and Soviet Interest, 1922-1945
“Japan Moves Town to Reach Coal Vein”
Some names from this episode:
Miles Lampson, British minister to China
Yang Jingyu, Fushun special branch secretary of the CCP
Liu Shaoqi, Communist labor organizer and secretary of the CCP’s Manchurian Committee from June 1929 to March 1930
Ting Chün-yang, veteran communist sent to Manchuria
Meng Yongqian, veteran communist sent to Manchuria
Episode artwork:
Postcard of a Fushun coal mine from the early 1940s
Listen now:
Transcript:
Welcome to episode 129 of the People’s History of Ideas Podcast.
Last episode we wrapped up our narrative of the events of the 1929 Sino-Soviet War. That narrative was heavily focused on the clashes between the Soviet Union and the Guomindang (and the Manchurian warlord forces allied with the Guomindang). This episode, I want to talk about how the Chinese Communist Party tried to intervene politically in that war, and then next episode we can talk about how the war dovetailed with a developing line within the Communist Party which was increasingly optimistic about the prospects for armed Communist revolution in China.
Just to refresh our memory, let’s review the timeline of how events played out with the war: In May and July of 1929, the Guomindang carried out a series of raids on Soviet interests in Manchuria, with the main objective being to seize control of the Chinese Eastern Railway. Then, following some initial skirmishes in July, the Soviets conducted a series of operations in August, October, and November which defeated the Guomindang and returned things to the way they were before the war.
Now, before we took this detour to discuss the Sino-Soviet War, we had been focusing this podcast on events related to the revolution being waged by Mao Zedong, Zhu De and others in Jiangxi and Fujian. Where we last left off with that, which is really the main branch of the story that we are following with this podcast, we talked about the significance of the 9th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in the 4th Red Army, and the Gutian Resolution which came out of that Congress, which had been held at the very end of 1929. So this whole war in Manchuria took place between the events of episode 116, when the Red Army waged a victorious campaign through parts of Jiangxi and Fujian, and episode 125, when we finished our discussion of the Gutian Resolution.
There were two fronts on which the Chinese Communist Party attempted to affect the Sino-Soviet War. In Shanghai and in Manchuria itself. In Shanghai, the Communists’ efforts were limited to propaganda and demonstrations. On July 14, 1929, the Communists held a pro-Soviet rally and initiated an anti-Guomindang campaign of putting up posters, writing graffiti, and distributing flyers. The Communist slogans were “Let us ally ourselves with the World’s Proletariat and Soviet Russia” and “Restore the friendship between China and Soviet Russia;” while the leaflets condemned “imperialist aggression against Soviet Russia.” The thrust of the message was that the Nationalists were being used by their foreign masters to attack the Soviet Union. This was illustrated by a cartoon that the Communists posted on Shanghai’s Bubbling Spring Well Temple which depicted Chinese soldiers being led by a Guomindang officer who was being ridden by a Japanese women. The caption had the woman saying, “My boy, have courage to proceed with your Chinese railway case. I am back of you.”
Now, for many observers at the time, the attempt by the Guomindang to seize the Chinese Eastern Railway seemed to be a relatively straightforward case of a nationalist government seizing major infrastructure that was controlled by a foreign power. And I can only assume that many people at the time wondered at how the Communists could have believed that the Guomindang was acting on behalf of foreign powers. However, because the Guomindang (which, I should mention for people who may have forgotten, is often translated as the Nationalist Party), because the Guomindang was understood by the Communist Party to represent foreign imperialist interests in China and to be perpetuating China’s subordinate position in a global system dominated by the powerful industrialized powers (Japan, the UK, France, the USA, and others), basically any action taken by the Guomindang could be (and was) represented by the Communists as the action of global imperialism in continuing China’s agony of oppression.
On the other hand, the Soviet Union, which the Communists understood to be the main opponent of imperialism and the world’s imperialist powers, was, by definition, the ally of the world’s oppressed people and, in this case, China’s workers and peasants in particular. And if the Soviets invaded China, that meant not so much a foreign invasion as an internationalist rendering of aid to the oppressed of China, it was basically the opening up of a second front in the war that the Communists were already waging against the Guomindang.
Now, the funny thing here is, that even though the Guomindang was basically guilty of what the Communists accused them of; that is, of working to impose an order in China where China really couldn’t break out of being a subordinate player in a world where countries are divided into oppressed and oppressor nations. And of course the Guomindang was guilty of perpetuating horrible crimes against workers and peasants in China who tried to bring about a more egalitarian order, as we have detailed in past episodes. Even though the Guomindang was guilty of all that, they were also motivated by nationalist ideas enough so that they often challenged the imperialist powers who they partnered with, and sometimes made themselves kind of a pain in the ass to those powers in the process. What this meant was that, when they tried to seize the Chinese Eastern Railway, the sympathies of the foreign powers who dominated China was much more with the Soviet Union than with the Guomindang.
The New York Times, for example, editorialized approvingly on December 8, 1929 that while other powers “argued, protested, but… submitted” when China curtailed their rights, Soviet Russia responded with “an ultimatum backed by military force.” During the lead up to the war, the British War Office in London had let it be known that it “favored the Russian contentions.” The Asahi Shimbun in Tokyo, one of Japan’s newspapers of record, also took the Soviet Union’s side early on by referring to China’s actions as a “hijacking.” And the American secretary of state informed the Chinese minister to the United States that China’s actions “might well be interpreted as an attack on Russia.”
After the war, the British minister to China, Miles Lampson, voiced an opinion shared by many in the diplomatic community: “[I]t is impossible not to pay a tribute to the extraordinary skill with which Russia handled the dispute. The restraint, the knowledge of psychology, Chinese and foreign, shown by the Soviet Government, and the manner in which their measures were adopted to the end in view and the means at their disposal were surprising. The situation with which they were faced in July, 1929, was one of which other Powers have had all too common experience—a forcible attack upon rights secured by treaty but which were represented as an infringement of China’s sovereignty.”
So, going back to examining the claims made in Communist political agitation about the war, we can see that, while a case might be made that the Guomindang attacks on Soviet interests in China did, in some objective sense, represent an imperialist attack on the Soviet Union, in the sense that the Guomindang represented imperialist interests in China in some overall systemic sense; they definitely were not acting on behalf of, or at the urging of, any of the actual particular imperialist powers who dominated China. And in fact, the Soviets had the sympathies of those powers, because the British and Japanese and American diplomats and businessmen in China tended to find the Guomindang’s efforts to push the boundaries of Chinese sovereignty tiresome.
Now, in addition to this political agitation against the Guomindang and in support of the Soviet Union that the Communists carried out in Shanghai, they also attempted to impact the war more directly in Manchuria by sending some of their more experienced organizers up to Manchuria to try and develop the workers’ movement there in support of the Soviet Union. The situation for the CCP in Manchuria at the beginning of 1929 was not very good. The Communists there had been hit hard by heavy repression, with lots of cadre having been arrested and organizing efforts among the workers having been heavily disrupted. But, because Manchuria had been a focus of industrial development by Japan, there was a steadily increasing working class population there, and despite the repression there was a fair amount of strike activity, with several strikes happening in late 1928 and early 1929. The challenge for the Communists was in how to intervene in these workers’ actions and divert them toward the goal of revolution.
For example, before the hostilities commenced between the USSR and the Guomindang, in March 1929 the Communists had sent three party activists to Fushun to organize the tens of thousands of workers there. Fushun, in southern Manchuria (in current day Liaoning province, just east of the city of Shenyang), had been a coal mining center since ancient times, but between 1920 and 1924 the Japanese had built a new city there and turned the place into a massive industrial complex, with steel mills and cement factories and machine plants, as well as a whole energy and transportation infrastructure to service all this heavy industry.
The trajectory of this effort by the Communists in Fushun is representative of the general difficulties that they faced because of the intense repression. These three party activists, one of whom was Yang Jingyu, who later went on to become well known for his heroics in leading anti-Japanese guerrillas in Manchuria, had some initial success in recruiting advanced workers (that is, workers who had a high degree of political awareness and were receptive to the Communists’ appeals) and they were able to create a basic union structure. However, the Communists had not yet succeeded in building out a mass base of support beyond the initial core of advanced workers who were drawn to their message when in July they attracted the attention of the Japanese police, who then coordinated with the Chinese police in neighboring Shenyang to conduct a joint roundup of 35 Communists and sympathetic workers in Shenyang and Fushun, putting an end to the Communist unionizing effort there. Some of these Communists would only escape imprisonment in 1931, during the chaos of Japan’s takeover of Manchuria.
So, in order to improve their chances in Manchuria, in June 1929 the Communists sent some of their best organizers to take over the party’s Manchurian Committee, with the aim of leveraging the Soviet war effort into a domestic communist uprising. Liu Shaoqi, one of the party’s senior labor organizers, was named secretary of the committee. He was accompanied by six other veteran cadres, including two who had attended the 1928 CCP party congress in Moscow. One of these was Ting Chün-yang, who had played several important roles in the Party, including serving as a liaison between the Central Committee and Moscow, and traveling to supervise party work in Nanjing, Hankou, and elsewhere. He was also alleged to have participated in the killings of wealthy gentry in Jinan. Meng Yongqian, the other participant in the 1928 party congress who was sent to Manchuria with Liu Shaoqi, would go on the play a number of important roles in the People’s Republic after liberation in 1949.
Thanks to the meticulous record-keeping of the Japanese empire’s police forces, an outline of the operational plan devised by the Manchurian Committee has survived, and I want to read out this document, because it can help us to visualize what the Communists hoped to accomplish in Manchuria, and also just what level their organization was operating at when they got to work in the summer of 1929.
RSM 105-107
So, now that we’ve read this, I think we can see that this is the operational plan for people who are really just getting started. They clearly don’t have a mass movement that they are either contending for leadership of or trying to divert. Rather, this is a plan for getting things off the ground. And as we saw with our example from Fushun, there were on the one hand some masses who were ready to respond to the Communists’ overtures. But on the other hand, there was an efficient repressive apparatus ready to spring into action once Communist activity became visible. And if the hope was that the war with the Soviet Union would disrupt the ability of the Guomindang and the Japanese to repress the Communists, that hope was disappointed.
Liu Shaoqi’s first major organizing effort after arriving in Manchuria was in Harbin, where he tried to convince Chinese employees of the Chinese Eastern Railway to join Soviet employees in going on strike. We discussed a couple of episodes ago how his lack of success in convincing the Chinese workers to join the Soviet workers on strike had to do with the legacy of discrimination against Chinese workers by the Soviet-run railway compared to the better treatment of Soviet workers. Liu did, however, manage to garner enough support among the workers to get a small group of them to sabotage the railway factory, so his efforts were not entirely in vain.
Liu then moved about 500 kilometers to the south to Shenyang. Here, Liu’s luck ran out, and on August 21 he was arrested along with Meng Yongqian during a meeting at a factory that the Communists were trying to organize. The police had taken notice of the distribution of Communist leaflets outside the gates of the Mukden Spinning Mill (Mukden is just the old Manchu name for the city of Shenyang). After the factory management paid off one of the workers who was suspected of being a Communist, the worker gave the police a list of party members at the factory, and a trap was laid to arrest people attending the strike meeting that Liu Shaoqi attended. Liu and Meng got lucky because they were not on that list (the worker informant didn’t know about them) and the police apparently assumed that rather than being the higher up organizers that they were, they were just inconsequential people who had gone to the meeting. This led to their release from jail after only 20 days locked up.
Almost forty years later, when Liu became the main target of struggle during the early years of the Cultural Revolution, this arrest and, more importantly, his release, was used against him. It was claimed that during Liu’s imprisonment in 1929 that he had surrendered to the enemy and turned traitor after being arrested, leading to the capture and execution of many Communists. The main evidence against him was testimony extracted under torture from Meng Yongqian, who was also arrested early on during the Cultural Revolution. Meng recanted his testimony against Liu after he was released.
Anyways, this arrest demonstrated the real difficulty in making progress in organizing in Manchuria to the team of crack organizers led by Liu Shaoqi who had been sent there. The police were just too effective at responding to any visible emergence of Communist organizing. And when the war between the Guomindang and the Soviet Union ended without any more progress being made, the perceived opening for seizing on the war to build the Communist movement had passed. Liu returned to Shanghai in March 1930. The Communist ‘A team,’ it turned out, was not any better than the ‘B team’ had been.
The effect of the repeated disappointments of the Communists in organizing workers in Manchuria was that they recognized that they needed to try something different, and as a result they pivoted away from trying to unionize workers in the major industrial concentrations and began focusing their work among the Korean population in southeastern Manchuria. The Korean population of southeastern Manchuria faced discrimination from both the Chinese authorities and the Japanese, and experienced widespread poverty as well as particular feelings of nationalist resentment at the Japanese conquest of Korea. Among this population, the Communists found a receptive mass base, and were able to sustain their organization despite the churn caused by the collaboration of the Japanese and Chinese authorities in repressing the Korean population. In September 1930, the Japanese police estimated the Communist party membership in the Jiandao region of southeastern Manchuria to be about 3800 Koreans and 150 Chinese. And a Japanese consul in the region estimated that about 10% of the local Korean population was sympathetic to the Communists.
Alright, next episode, we will move on to discuss how the Sino-Soviet war dovetailed with a developing line within the Communist Party which was increasingly optimistic about the prospects for armed Communist revolution in China.
Until then, be well.