The story of how the co-founder and first General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party became a Trotskyist.
Further reading:
Gregor Benton, China’s Urban Revolutionaries: Explorations in the History of Chinese Trotskyism, 1921-1952
Gregor Benton, Prophets Unarmed: Chinese Trotskyists in Revolution, War, Jail, and the Return from Limbo
Lee Feigon, Chen Duxiu: Founder of the Chinese Communist Party
Chang Kuo-t’ao [Zhang Guotao], The Rise of the Chinese Communist Party (2 volumes)
Tony Saich, The Rise to Power of the Chinese Communist Party
Jane Price, Cadres, Commanders, and Commissars: The Training of the Chinese Communist Leadership, 1920-1945
Some names from this episode:
Chen Duxiu, co-founder of the Communist Party of China
Li Dazhao, co-founder of the Communist Party of China
Zheng Chaolin, Chinese Trotskyist
Li Lisan, leading Communist
Yin Kuan, resigned as Provincial Secretary in Anhui
Peng Shuzhi, resigned as Provincial Secretary in Zhili
Wang Zekai, Chinese Trotskyist
Liu Bojian, former Provincial Secretary in Hubei
Ren Xu, Chinese Trotskyist
Xiang Ying, Jiangsu Provincial Secretary following the 6th Party Congress
Cai Zhende, member of Jiangsu Provincial Committee
Zhou Enlai, head of the Organization Department of the Central Committee
Wang Ruofei, sent to work in a factory in Moscow as punishment for Trotskyism before recanting
Qu Qiubai, top leader of Communist Party from the summer of 1927 until the Sixth Congress
Zhang Guotao, leading Communist
Episode artwork:
Chen Duxiu with Peng Shuzi in 1932
Listen now:
Transcript:
Welcome to episode 132 of the People’s History of Ideas Podcast.
This episode we’re going to focus on Chen Duxiu and look at what he had to say about the Sino-Soviet war in Manchuria and his criticism of the ‘Third Period’ concept that came out of the Comintern and was enthusiastically adopted by many of the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party. We will also see how these disagreements that he had with the Party Center led him to become a Trotskyist.
We haven’t been talking a lot about Chen Duxiu lately, although for quite a while he was a major figure in the history that we covered in this podcast. As you might recall, he had been a co-founder, along with Li Dazhao, of the Communist Party, and then served as the top leader, the General Secretary, of the Party from 1921 until 1927, when he was kicked out of the party leadership at the August 7, 1927 emergency conference (which we discussed back in episode 56), after the united front with the Guomindang Left fell apart. He bore the brunt of the blame for a policy which had prioritized maintaining unity with the political representatives of the national bourgeoisie because of an interpretation of Marxism which saw the natural leaders of a democratic revolution as being the bourgeoisie. And once those left-wing bourgeois leaders began murdering peasants who had risen up, he found himself in the impossible position of trying to keep on working with forces which were actively repressing peasants and workers and which soon turned on the Communist Party itself. (And, just as a reminder for listeners not up on all the terminology, the term ‘national bourgeoisie’ refers to that section of the capitalist class whose material interests lay in a form of domestic capitalism not dependent on foreign capitalists, who in this case were understood by the Communist Party and the Comintern to be represented by the left-wing of the Guomindang.)
On the one hand, his own political interpretation of Marxism had led him to believe that there could be no democratic revolution without the national bourgeoisie’s leadership. But on the other hand, he had been pushed into more and more compromised positions in the pursuit of unity with the Guomindang Left by a series of directives from Moscow which Chen Duxiu had described as being “like taking a bath in a toilet” (see episode 53 for more on that). So on the one hand, at the August 7, 1927 emergency conference, Chen had been correctly blamed for having endorsed and pushed a policy which had culminated in a real bloodbath and reverse for the revolution, but he also got scapegoated for the Comintern’s role in pushing that policy beyond the line that Chen had thought it a good idea.
So, that’s about where we had left things with Chen Duxiu. So, what did he do after being forced from the party leadership (but not, to be clear, expelled from the party)?
Chen’s initial reaction was to retreat into a purely academic pursuit which seems to have served to comfort him at various times in his life when things seemed very bleak. Since Chen’s early student days, he had intermittently conducted philological research on the differences between Chinese dialects. So, after going underground in Shanghai, at first he mainly occupied himself on this apolitical research that was a comfort for him. Qu Qiubai met with him and asked Chen to contribute to the party journal, Bolshevik, and so Chen started writing a column titled ‘Inch of Iron’ under a pseudonym, and also contributed some short poems which made fun of the Guomindang. Other than these small writing assignments, the party did not give him any new tasks for most of a year. He must have had a lot of time to kill since he had to basically spend most of his time hiding inside his safehouse with little to occupy him other than his philological hobby.
Eventually, the Party did try to do something with him, which was to ship him off to Moscow. You might remember from episode 101 that during the spring 1928 preparations for the 6th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party which was held in Moscow that summer, Chen was asked to attend the Congress but he refused to go. According to some accounts he was asked a couple other times as well about going to Moscow, but refused those requests as well. It’s likely that, while his time as a leader in China was over, that the Comintern still felt that he could be useful to it in Moscow (just, as you might recall from episode 106, happened when Qu Qiubai and Zhang Guotao were asked to remain in Moscow after the 6th Party Congress ended, to remove the main representatives of the left and right wings of the party from China, but to keep them useful in managing all the Chinese students in Moscow and in advising the Comintern on Chinese matters). But Chen Duxiu wasn’t someone who wanted to go live in Moscow, he wanted to stay in China. But he didn’t actually have a lot to do anymore in China.
And, if ever there was an archetypical case to be made for the notion that the Devil makes work for idle hands, the genesis of Trotskyism in China has got to be a good candidate. But to understand how Chen became a Trotskyist, we need to take a second and look at the activity, or maybe better-put the lack of activity, of a group of people who remained devoted to him even after he was deposed from Party leadership.
By the fall of 1928, there were a good number of party cadres who had remained loyal to Chen Duxiu and who had been sidelined as the party forged ahead with a new political line. Some of these cadres had been deliberately marginalized, and others had resigned their positions of work or responsibility, but not resigned from the party itself. Zheng Chaolin, a Chen Duxiu loyalist who was replaced as the editor of Bolshevik because he and Li Lisan couldn’t get along because of their political differences, recalls the situation of other Chen Duxiu loyalists in the fall of 1928 and early 1929 in his memoir:
“While Li Lisan held power, that was exactly how followers of Chen were dealt with. Sharing my idleness were Yin Kuan, who resigned as Provincial Secretary in Anhui; Peng Shuzhi, who resigned as Provincial Secretary in Zhili; Wang Zekai, who’d been… kept out of a job by the Central Committee; Liu Bojian, who had escaped from Hubei, where he had been Provincial Secretary, to Shanghai, but was kept idle by the Central Committee; and Ren Xu, who was in the same boat as Wang Zekai.”
So, there was this little group of Chen Duxiu loyalists who had either left their party posts, or been ousted from them, and didn’t really have any tasks to carry out.
And then, in early 1929, the Jiangsu Provincial Committee rebelled against the Central Committee, and even though the rebellion wasn’t based on the dissent of the Chen Duxiu loyalists, a bunch of them involved themselves in the incident. Basically, what happened, was that Xiang Ying was appointed Secretary of the Jiangsu Provincial Committee after the 6th Party Congress. Xiang had been a labor organizer along with Li Lisan in Shanghai back in the mid-1920s, and they had developed a kind of personal rivalry, and so Xiang led a kind of provincial revolt against Li Lisan’s leadership in early 1929. Now this guy, Cai Zhende, who was a Chen Duxiu loyalist, was on the Jiangsu Provincial Committee and he supported Xiang when the Provincial Committee declared its independence from the Central Committee. And he gathered together all of these idle old Chen Duxiu supporters to meet at his house and see how they could support this rebellion in the party.
Anyways, Zhou Enlai stepped in and managed to quash the rebellion and reorganize the Jiangsu Provincial Committee. Keep in mind, Zhou was Li Lisan’s main rival to lead the party at the time, so that might have eased his job in mollifying the rebel Provincial Committee. So the people who rebelled against the Central Committee were not expelled from the Party, just kicked out of the reorganized Jiangsu Provincial Committee. A bunch of them were assigned new work, but Cai Zhende wasn’t. However, the Party kept on paying for the house that Cai Zhende was living in, so a bunch of these old Chen Duxiu loyalists went and moved into Cai Zhende’s house so they could all be together. This was around mid-February 1929.
These guys’ house got raided a month later and the police found some incriminating documents and so a bunch of these Chen Duxiu loyalists got arrested. Zhou Enlai mounted a major effort to get these guys out of jail, and apparently the material found in the house couldn’t have been too serious, because Zhou’s efforts were able to get these Chen Duxiu loyalists released toward the end of April 1929.
Then, when they got out of jail, one of their friends who had not been jailed showed up and had some new documents to share with them. Here, this guy Zheng Chaolin gives a pretty good account of the process whereby Chen Duxiu and his loyalists became Trotskyists, so let’s look at his own account of this in his own words:
“After we’d moved and settled down, Yin Kuan [the guy who had resigned as secretary of the Anhui Party Committee] dropped in on us one day. Yin was meant to have visited us on the day we were arrested, but for some reason he hadn’t come, so he’d escaped the misfortune that befell the rest of us. Now he started coming regularly again. Probably in mid or late May 1929, he brought some unusual mimeographed documents for us to see, documents of the Trotskyist Opposition in the Soviet Union. They were poorly translated and poorly mimeographed, but still they were intelligible. Yin Kuan had obviously been affected by them. He excitedly introduced them to us. I can’t remember which documents they were, and whether he brought them separately or in one go, but they immediately gripped me. I had known that there was a fierce struggle going on in the Soviet Party… But I didn’t know what the issues were, or even that they extended to the question of the Chinese Revolution. But now I had the documents in my hands. It turned out that Trotsky had publicly pointed out long before the defeat of the revolution that the Comintern’s basic line on the Chinese Revolution was wrong, and that after the defeat of the revolution he had publicly pointed out that Bukharin and Stalin should take the blame for it. It also turned out that Trotsky had pointed out even after the Wuhan debacle that the Chinese Revolution had already been defeated. This was exactly what Chen Duxiu and his followers thought. We immediately embraced Trotsky’s system of thought and steeped ourselves in his writings in order to discover on what grounds he had arrived at these two standpoints. They were not simply derived from his basic theory of ‘permanent revolution’. He had analysed and quoted a large number of documents, including a copy of the resolution of the Jiangsu Provincial Committee drafted by Wang Ruofei pointing out numerous errors committed by the Central Committee of the CCP. Wang Ruofei had published this document in Moscow and the Trotskyist students there had translated it into Russian for Trotsky. But it was very hard for us to achieve a thorough understanding of Trotsky’s basic theory. In Moscow we (for almost all of us who had now become Chen Duxiu supporters were Moscow people) had studied Marxism and Leninism, but not Trotskyism. We’d known for a long time that Trotsky had a ‘theory of permanent revolution’, but we had no idea what it said. In the past we’d also applied ourselves to questions like the nature of society, the nature of the revolution, the motive power of the revolution, the object of the revolution, the stages of the revolution, revolutionary strategy and tactics, the revolutionary state, and so on. But we’d studied them one by one, in isolation from one another: we were unable to assemble such a wide range of topics into a single whole, so the more we learned, the more muddled we became. Now, after studying the ‘theory of permanent revolution’, these topics suddenly sprang to life and became linked together in a coherent system, so they were no longer confusing. After that I dropped the question of who was to blame for the defeat of the revolution and whether the tide was high or low and went on to ‘indulge myself in abstract thinking’, that is, to study basic principles and the theoretical aspect of how these various issues hung together.”
So, let’s pause to consider a couple of things here before we pick back up with the memoir. As we can see, the Trotsky documents really spoke to the experience of these idle Chen Duxiu loyalists. The Trotsky documents spoke to these guys on two important levels. First, Trotsky shared an assessment of what had happened with the Chinese Revolution that Chen Duxiu and his loyalists shared, which was that the revolution had been defeated, and that really the thing to do now was to basically start back over again. They strongly disagreed with the assessment of the Comintern which was embraced by much of the current Party leadership, which was that there was a high tide of revolution coming soon. And they didn’t think that the revolution going on in the countryside being led by Mao and Zhu De was of very much significance. These were people whose vision of China was very focused on the cities, and what they saw was a highly repressive and unfavorable political environment.
Also of tremendous importance to these guys was the issue of who was to blame for the defeat. Trotsky blamed Stalin and the Comintern for the disasters that the Communist Party faced in 1927. This felt much better to Chen’s followers than recognizing that they needed to bear their share of the blame as well. But they were understandably bitter at the way in which all blame was put on Chen Duxiu, and none on the Comintern. Chen himself demonstrated the unwillingness of himself and his loyalists to consistently take responsibility for the political line that they followed and which he presumably had responsibility for as the leader of the Chinese Party. A good example of this is his 1930 ‘Reply to the Comintern,’ which starts off promisingly, when he writes:
“After the tragic and shameful defeat of the Chinese Revolution in 1927, for a while I was really at a loss as to what course of action to follow, since I myself bore a heavy responsibility for the defeat. So I spent almost a whole year personally reflecting on those events. Although I did not thoroughly grasp the lessons of the defeat in time, and failed to discover a new way forward, I am deeply aware on the basis of my own experience that this defeat was the inevitable outcome of the entire political line of the past period.”
This sounds like he was accepting responsibility, but then he then moves on to say that:
“Because of your deceiving ways and your blockade on the free passage of information, it was not until half a year ago that some documents by Comrade Trotsky on the Chinese question and some questions relating to the Soviet Union came into our hands. It was only then that we thoroughly and systematically understood the true source of the opportunism and adventurism perpetrated in the course of the Chinese Revolution.”
Essentially shifting the blame away from himself and onto the Comintern. This question of blame seems to have been very important to these Chen Duxiu loyalists, because it occupies such an important place in their works. They seem unaware that many other people who had just as much to be upset at the Comintern about, and who bore much less responsibility for the reverses of 1927, were moving on with trying to salvage the Chinese Revolution. But those people were not immobilized politically by believing the Revolution to have already been defeated.
In his memoir, Zheng Chaolin gives an account of the process whereby three of Chen Duxiu’s closest loyalists prevailed upon him to become a Trotskyist over the course of a series of meetings between mid-May and mid-July 1929:
“After reading each of Trotsky’s documents, Chen would raise a disagreement, and then they would argue with him; but by the next time he came he would have abandoned his previous disagreement and would raise a new one on the shoulders of their old argument. In the course of his gradual conversion to their point of view, he had never once yielded to them in their presence, but next time he came face to face with them he would raise new differences on the basis of what they had previously told him.”
Now, it certainly seems from this account as if Chen was on his way to becoming a Trotskyist in any case, but in July you might recall that the first skirmishes between the Soviets and Guomindang-allied forces took place in Manchuria. And, as we discussed in episode 129, mid-July was when the Communists launched their campaign of support for the Soviets in the war, with Shanghai being the main place where they were able to carry out demonstrations and propaganda activities. The war in Manchuria seems to have been either the tipping point for Chen Duxiu in becoming a Trotskyist, or to have provided the first major opportunity for him to express his opposition to the Party Center in a way informed by this newfound Trot influence.
It’s worth noting that events in Manchuria had been important moments in his own political development earlier in his life. The Russian occupation of Manchuria had been the impetus for Chen awakening to political life in the period after 1900. And in 1915 Chen founded the journal New Youth in response to Japanese actions in Manchuria. So there was an emotional freight to events in Manchuria for Chen that perhaps accelerated his political transformation.
Chen expressed his disagreements with the Party Center in a series of three letters. The first letter was dated July 18, just four days after the pro-Soviet demonstration held by the Communists in Shanghai that we discussed in episode 129. This letter was a pretty mild criticism, and was published in the party paper. In it, Chen wrote that the Communist slogans would offend the nationalist sentiment of the masses, and he urged the Party instead to focus on explaining the reactionary nature of the Guomindang and how, despite the current war, the Soviet Union’s policies toward China had differed from those of the imperialist countries. The underlying reasoning that Chen articulated in the letter for why he advocated different slogans than the Party Center did was precisely because he viewed the revolution as having been defeated for the time being, and he felt that the Guomindang had basically won the allegiance of the masses. Therefore, in his view, it was important for the Party to kind of start over in explaining basic things about the nature of the Guomindang, the Soviet Union, and imperialism to the masses, as part of a new long term project of rebuilding mass support for the Communist Party. On the other hand, as we have discussed in past episodes, the Party Center saw the Soviet war in Manchuria as another front in the armed struggle that they were already waging to try and win the revolution, so for them, slogans supporting the Soviet side made much more sense than very basic political education slogans.
Chen’s second letter was written on August 5, and in this letter he restated his view, more strongly this time (this letter wasn’t published in the party press) that the Party was divorcing itself from the masses with the position it was taking. Then, a few days later, Chen shot off another letter in which he totally came out of the bag with his criticisms of the ‘mistaken line of the party.’ He said that since 1927 the party had followed a policy of blind adventurism and that the idea that the country was experiencing a ‘high tide’ of revolution, or would soon, was totally mistaken and was dividing the party from the masses. This letter explicitly bore the mark of Trotsky’s influence.
In particular, Chen had adopted Trotsky’s position that the bourgeoisie had come to power in China. Some of the phrases that Chen used in his letter were that “the bourgeoisie has won victories against both feudalism and imperialism” and that “the current regime is a purely bourgeois one and the Guomindang is a purely bourgeois party.” This contrasted with the Communist Party’s position that the ruling class in China was a coalition of “landlords, compradors, and the bourgeoisie under the direction of the imperialists.” This led them to see the Guomindang as a coalition containing irreconcilable contradictions, and that the competition within that coalition would open up possibilities for revolution in China (such as the Central Plains War, which has come up a few times in recent episodes of this podcast, and was an important element in Mao seizing parts of Jiangxi and Fujian). In contrast, Chen’s adoption of Trotsky’s position led him to conceptualize the fighting among the warlords as clashes between various bourgeois factions, such as between heavy industrial capital and light industrial capital.
Related to this, Chen and the Trotskyists characterized the Chinese countryside as having already been pervaded by capitalist relations, rather than being mainly characterized by semifeudal relations. What this meant for Chen was that exploitation by landlords was secondary to the experience of exploitation of labor by rich peasants and capitalist farmers. This was inaccurate and, I think, a result of Chen’s essentially urban vision of China, leading him to conceptualize the Chinese countryside in a way where Marxist analysis became more a kind of speculative theology than an analysis of concrete conditions (and, I might add, Chen Duxiu is certainly not the first and would not be the last Marxist to employ Marxist analysis as a form of speculative theology). This might seem like an academic point, but the strategic implications of getting this question wrong were major. For example, in the conception of Mao and also of the Party Center, seeing the landlord-peasant class struggle as the central contradiction in China’s countryside led to an orientation of leading a broad struggle of the peasant masses against the landlords, whereas Chen proposed that only the poor peasants and rural wage laborers were potential allies of the revolution in the countryside, because he saw rich peasants (and many middle peasants) as capitalist exploiters rather than as people with an interest in overthrowing feudal relations.
With Chen Duxiu’s conversion to Trotskyism, the issue of Trotskyism became a momentary crisis for the Chinese party. As we discussed in episode 128, there was a lot of Trotskyist influence among the students at Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow, and after one of them visited Trotsky in Turkey while on the way back to China from studying in Moscow, the authorities in the Soviet Union decided that something had to be done about all these Chinese Trotskyist students. And in China, measures were taken to repudiate Chen Duxiu and his followers.
The purge carried out in Moscow was pretty vicious. One scholar estimates that about 200 of the Chinese students in Moscow at the beginning of 1930 were Trotskyist. Dozens of these students disappeared, and were either executed or sent to labor camps. Some of those sent to labor camps were later repatriated to China in the 1950s. Some targets of the purge were allowed to retain their party membership after a period of several months working at a Soviet factory under close ideological supervision, with the understanding that the work would help to remold their outlook and then they would get to prove their loyalty once they were sent back to China. A small number of the Chinese students targeted in the purge were lucky to be sent back to China without punishment in the Soviet Union.
One target of the purge described the ordeal as “shattering experiences for the individuals being scrutinized, for the slightest possible blemish from the past was apt to be publicly questioned. Even one’s family history going back to remote ancestors was thoroughly investigated. It was a cruel method of inquiry. In the heavy crossfire and charges, many of the weak people simply broke down. Even the most robust and strong-willed among us were bathed in their own sweat at these inquisitions.”
Few Chinese in Moscow were above suspicion. Qu Qiubai and Zhang Guotao were taken to task for allowing the situation with the Chinese Trotskyist students to get out of hand, and both were investigated for Trotskyist sympathies. As punishment for Qu’s and Zhang’s failure to give proper pastoral ideological care to the Chinese students in Moscow, the wives of Qu and Zhang were made to go and work in factories under close observation. Apparently Qu and Zhang were needed for tasks related to China and couldn’t be quickly replaced, but their wives could be punished as a way of symbolically punishing Qu and Zhang.
In China, the Politburo reached a decision in early October to give the Trotskyists, including especially Chen, the opportunity to repudiate their politics or face expulsion from the Party. Chen himself was told that if he wanted to remain in the Party, he would have the assignment of drafting the Party’s repudiation of Trotskyism. While this was a kind of last chance to come back to the fold, it doesn’t appear that anyone expected Chen or any of his closest loyalists to take up the offer, and none did (although there were a few cadre who had played an important role in bringing Trotskyism to China who soon recanted). On November 15, Chen was expelled from the Party.
Chen Duxiu was a major political figure in early 20th century China, and it was very significant when he lent his personal prestige to the founding of the Communist Party in 1921 and then served as its first General Secretary. Stalin was worried about the damage that Chen could cause and summoned Qu Qiubai and Zhang Guotao to discuss the situation. Stalin asked them if they thought that Chen would be able to find the funds and other necessities for founding a newspaper. Zhang told Stalin that he thought that while Chen had been able to operate a newspaper in the past, that his time as a prominent Communist leader had led to him completely losing contact with society, in Zhang’s words, and that no one would fund him to start a newspaper now.
As it turned out, Stalin had little to worry about. CLR James, who was once a leading Trotskyist before becoming a kind of autonomist Marxist and darling of anticolonial academia, described the Trotskyists as the “comedians of the vanguard party,” and their Chinese adherents were true to form, quickly dividing into four different groupings. We’ve seen in past episodes of this podcast that inside the Chinese Communist Party itself, people who had some fairly divergent views were able to maintain some level of unity with each other and work together (although at times this was clearly difficult), because they shared a unified purpose in making a communist revolution in China. Judging from what activities they engaged in, however, the Chinese Trotskyists were more concerned with attacking the Comintern than the Guomindang and the imperialists.
Clearly, the Chinese Trotskyists were bitter. And many of them, including Chen Duxiu, certainly had some good reasons to be bitter and angry. But this bitterness and anger led them to direct the spearhead of their struggle not at the real oppressors of the people of China, but at their former comrades and at the Soviet Union. And this led them into sectarian divisions and political irrelevance. Even as Japan occupied China in the late 1930s, they were most concerned with coming out with Chinese editions of materials on the show trials in Moscow.
There is, I think, an object lesson in their experience that, however legitimate one’s feelings of bitterness and anger may be, it’s ultimately self-destructive to indulge those feelings and let them guide your actions.
OK, before I go, one piece of business. The small segment of our audience who consists of academic historians will probably be aware that the American Historical Association is having its annual meeting in January. Since it’s going to be here in Chicago and there are some sessions that I’m interested in checking out, I’m planning on attending. If you are an academic historian and listen this podcast and are planning to be in Chicago for the upcoming AHA, I’d be interested in meeting up and talking. I have some thoughts about podcasting, the practice of presenting academic history in ways that are accessible for broad audiences, and some other stuff related to the practice of telling the histories of revolutionary movements that I’d like to talk with some other people about. Also, it might be cool to hang out. If you’re interested, shoot me an email and hopefully we can find a way to connect.
Also, I am very pleased to announce that a Chinese translation of my book, Transpacific Revolutionaries: The Chinese Revolution in Latin America, will soon be published in the People’s Republic of China. For those of you listening in China, keep on the lookout for it, and I will have more information on that soon.
OK, that’s it for now. Until next time, be well.