The Guomindang’s revolution had one great weakness: it had been carried out by a means other than those of traditional Chinese revolutions, and was an imported product. And what in fact was the Guomindang? It was just a certain number of intellectuals who for the most part had numerous overseas links, and who were convinced – and they were moreover right about this, and it explains their success – that China could only resist the pressure of European colonialism by ‘modernising’ itself. ‘Modernising’ itself of course meant ‘Europeanising’ itself; it was necessary to copy the institutions of Europe in the same way that it was necessary to copy its technology, taking over its ideas as well as its methods. To sum up, the revolution that the Guomindang proposed for China was a revolution of imitation.
It was a revolution of the type that had been made half a century earlier by Japan, and which had turned out to be a magnificent success.
In Japan, the traditional power, that of the Shogun,
[1] who personified old Japan, had been overthrown, and Europe had been copied. Factories and workshops were built on the European model, production was in the hands of private capitalists, as in Europe, and the state functioned by means of an elected parliament and ministers responsible to it, as in Europe. Now this servile imitation succeeded in less than 50 years in making Japan into one of the greatest economic powers and one of the strongest states in the world.
Why should what had succeeded in Japan not also succeed in China? It was only a matter of overthrowing the emperor, the personification of the old China, just as Japan had overthrown the shogun, the personification of the old Japan, and then of setting about copying Europe. Such was the underlying idea of the Guomindang, that inspired its whole policy.
But China is not Japan. Throughout its long history, Japan has never been any more than an imitator, and it has always accepted without ever giving anything in return. It was China, in the sixth century BC, that gave Japan its first religion, Shintoism, based on ancestor-worship, and its first moral code, that of Confucius;
[2] a thousand years later it was through China that Buddhism came to it, after first having been digested by the Chinese;
[3] it was China which taught it to write (about the fifth century AD);
[4] its arts, sculpture and painting are Buddhist, and its music is Chinese; it was on the model of the emperor of China as the ‘son of heaven’ that Japan had its emperor, also the ‘son of heaven’, surrounded by ceremonial copied from that of the Chinese court. More important still, it was China which taught it to grow tea and cotton, gave it the mulberry tree and acquainted it with silk; it was China which, in the fourth century AD, taught it how to weave,
[5] and in the sixteenth century taught it the art of porcelain.
[6]
So by copying Europe, Japan was only changing the source of its imitations, and remained true to its tradition of imitation.
China, on the other hand, has hardly ever imitated; it has always drawn upon its own resources. The little that came to it from abroad, like Buddhism, it profoundly transformed, recasting it in its own moulds. The Guomindang, which had only offered the Chinese people European institutions such as capitalism, the republic, and the opium of such phrases as ‘social reforms’, could not therefore satisfy China’s creative genius. Therein, so it seems to me, lies the basic reason for its failure.
This failure, in any case, was total. During the 20 or more years when it was in power, from 1928 to 1949, not only did it fail to carry out its programme, it hardly even outlined it; and nowhere did it succeed in copying Europe. It did not even succeed in borrowing one of Europe’s most superficial and easily transferable traits: the political regime. This relatively simple matter, which consists of instituting a parliament, proceeding to elections and governing by means of responsible ministers, was not even attempted, as we have seen. Under the new ‘republic’, China was governed as dictatorially as under the empire, with the Guomindang cliques struggling for influence just as the court cliques had done formerly.
As regards the other points of its modernisation programme, the Guomindang was no better able to realise them. It did not succeed in making China into an industrial country. Industry, even where the capital and management were purely Chinese, remained almost exclusively confined within the limits of the foreign ‘concessions'; elsewhere the Guomindang was not able to go beyond the stage of paper planning: a Chinese capitalist class could no more cover China with a vast network of industries than had foreign capital; the railways, the basic element in any industrialisation and of the entire ‘modernisation’ of a state, especially in such a vast continent as China, were only built at a snail’s pace.
Finally, the agricultural system remained as it was. The French Revolution had established capitalism by embarking on a vast scheme of land expropriation which had furnished the capital necessary for the needs of industrialisation; but however much Sun Yat-sen had inscribed in his programme an agrarian reform, the Guomindang did nothing to bring it into operation.
To sum up, the Guomindang did not satisfy any of the three needs that were its reason for existence: it did not make the tiller of the soil its owner; China did not become an industrial country, and it was not governed in accordance with a constitutional regime. The attempt to imitate Europe had accordingly achieved nothing. Hence the second revolution.
Prologue to the New Revolution: The Break with the Russians
We have seen that in 1921, the Guomindang parliament in Canton felt itself strong enough to assert its independence of the Beijing puppet-presidents by proclaiming itself an independent republic and appointing Sun Yat-sen its president.
Now 1921 was the time when the new Russian regime also began to consolidate itself, when the forces of the Tsarist generals had been defeated and dispersed, and consequently Russia was able to play some sort of rôle abroad, and look for allies, and perhaps even subjects, outside its own frontiers. Now the chaotic state of China at this time offered an eminently favourable opportunity for outside intervention, and Russia seized it.
It offered its services to the Guomindang to help it in the struggle against the northern generals, and the offer was warmly accepted. As a result, Moscow sent a political advisor to Canton, Borodin,
[7] a military advisor, Blücher,
[8] and more important still, equipment and weapons. At the same time, a Chinese Communist Party was organised and ordered to march hand in hand with the Guomindang bourgeoisie, whilst being ever ready to shoot it in the back at the first opportunity.
[9]
And so it happened that in actual fact it was a Communist-Guomindang army, but under the command of the Guomindang general Chiang Kai-shek, that undertook the march to Hankou, and it was the workers of Shanghai, who under Communist inspiration, had taken over the city by means of a general strike and insurrection, even before Chiang Kai-shek’s forces had entered it.
[10]
By acting in this way, the Russians evidently had the aim of Russifying China. They proposed that it should no longer ‘modernise’ itself, as the Guomindang was inviting it to, by copying Europe and America, with their private capital and their democracy, but by copying Russia with its much more up-to-date methods of state capitalism and dictatorship.
This collaboration with the Guomindang, an attempt to penetrate China by means of infiltration into the heart of bourgeois movements, which 20 years later was to be so successful in Czechoslovakia,
[11] and only narrowly failed in France and Italy,
[12] was a complete fiasco in China. No sooner had the forces of the Guomindang entered Shanghai than Chiang resolutely set about ridding himself of his ‘Communist’ allies, even though the whole of northern China was still in the hands of the dujun, by one of the most unexpected and bloodiest coups in history.
Since Shanghai was the greatest industrial centre in China, it was in Shanghai where the main forces of the Chinese Communist Party were; the Communists counted on the workers of Shanghai first of all to increase their influence in the coalition, and afterwards to be able to expel their partners. That is why, realising that it was necessary to strike at the head, it was in Shanghai that the Guomindang struck its blow, 15 days after the capture of the city. On 12 April 1927, using those same troops who had entered the city as ‘liberators’, and on whose loyalty he knew he could safely rely, Chiang Kai-shek disarmed the workers’ militia that had taken over the city, sacked the headquarters of the workers’ organisations, and set about the methodical massacre of all the ‘Communists’ and sympathisers there were in Shanghai, and all the proletarians who showed any degree of militancy.
[13]
That was the end of the Russian experiment, or at least of its first experiment. Borodin and all the members of his mission had to flee. Any Communist who was in the country, and not only in Shanghai, was hunted down, arrested, beheaded or shot. A last attempt at resistance, ordered personally by Stalin, took place in Canton on 11 December 1927 in the form of an armed insurrection, but the Guomindang forces had the upper hand in 48 hours, and this was only an opportunity for them to destroy the Communists in the south as thoroughly as they had done in central China.
[14]
Starting from this time, a real iron curtain was drawn between China and Russia. For the first time, the Chinese worker was left to himself, free of both bourgeois and Russian influence.
He was free of bourgeois influence because the Shanghai massacre had been for him what the June days had been for the Parisian workers in the last century.
[15] For the previous decades, the Chinese proletariat had been under the influence of the Guomindang, which it had followed during its revolutionary struggle against the emperor and military anarchy, just as until February 1848 the proletariat of Paris had been under the influence of the republicans who had led it in the assault upon throne and altar, but the blood of April in Shanghai had broken the allegiance of the Chinese worker to the Guomindang, just as that of June in Paris had broken the French workers’ loyalty to the republic.
In the second place, by the same token the Chinese proletariat was freed from the Russian leadership that had begun to implant itself within it, for the sole and simple reason that the Russians had disappeared. For not only had the Russians properly so-called disappeared, but so had the Chinese whom the Russians had placed in the leadership of the Communist Party, who were liquidated by what remained of the party; in fact on 7 August, the Central Committee of the Communist Party dismissed Chen Duxiu, who until then had been the General Secretary of the party, and Moscow’s trusted man.
[16]
The Chinese workers were thus left to themselves, and that is why they became more conscious of themselves.
[17]From now on, they began to build their movement by themselves and for themselves. That is why the birth of the Second Chinese Revolution dates from the morrow of the massacre of Shanghai.
The Precursors: The Taipings
The precursors of this revolution were all those popular movements, those revolts of the ‘vagabonds’ which we have seen occupying so great a place in the history of China ever since the third century before our era; its immediate precursor, the last of these revolts, which took place when China was first making contact with Europe, 10 or more years after the Opium War, was the work of the Taiping.
At the end of 1849 and the beginning of 1850, almost on the morrow of the 1848 European revolution, in other words – is this a coincidence, or a remote echo?
[18] – some peasants in the region of Canton belonging to an ethnic group considered to be pure descendants of Chinese immigrants from the north, connected with an old secret society, that of the ‘Triads’, who wore long hair as a mark of distinction, armed themselves, rose in revolt, and under the command of one of their own leaders, Hong Xiuquan, set out on a march to the north.
[19]
Just as the Guomindang were to do three-quarters of a century later, to begin with they made for Hankou, the heart of China; they took it in 1852, and then, just as the armies of the Guomindang were to do, they descended the course of the Blue River and captured Nanjing in 1853; finally, again like Chiang Kai-shek, they pushed towards the north, won over the basin of the Yellow River, occupying Shanxi there and finally camping on the outskirts of Tianjin in 1853. But the Manchu emperor had time to place Beijing in a state of defence; the Taiping, as the insurgents were now called, did not dare attack the capital, and they withdrew to the south, where they felt they were strongest. There they installed themselves, and set up a state that was to extend over all the provinces on the right bank of the Blue River, covering part of Hunan, all of Jiangxi, part of Zhejiang, Anhui and Jiangsu: its capital was Nanjing, on the very border of the new state.
The Taipings therefore occupied one of China’s richest regions, if not the richest, with a surface area of some 400 000 or 500 000 square kilometres, and a population that can be estimated as at least 40 million inhabitants.
The Taiping movement was partly political, for it had the abolition of the Manchu dynasty in its programme, but it was above all a social movement, whose principal aim was the division of the land into equal plots on each of which would be established a group of 25 families – a sort of agricultural phalanstery.
[20]
It is a curious, but on reflection not a surprising fact, that this movement, essentially peasant and thoroughly Chinese, should feel the need to place itself under the banner of a foreign ideology. The prestige of Europe, a continent that had hardly been revealed to the Chinese, was already so great that it was in the name of the Gospel and of Jesus that the Taiping launched their armies and divided up the land.
[21] There is in fact nothing that more strengthens belief in the success of a cause than to adorn it with a banner that has the lure of mystery just because it hails from afar, and of force because it is that of a power. The Taipings of 1850 were ‘Christians’ for the same reason that their successors of 1950 are ‘Communists’.
The Taiping state lasted for more than 12 years, and its life would no doubt have been much longer if it had not come into collision with the Europeans, whose faith it shared.
The Taiping state almost reached the gates of Shanghai. These social reformers, who based their claim on the Gospel, were rightly regarded as extremely dangerous by the very Christian Europeans who were then in the process of installing themselves in the ‘concessions’ that had just been assigned to them after the Opium War. And since it was obvious that official China, that of Beijing, was incapable of getting rid of them with its own forces, it was the Europeans of Shanghai who took the matter in hand; they enrolled mercenary troops composed of men of all nationalities, under the command of American, British and French adventurers, and launched them against the Taipings.
After two years of bitter struggle, their capital, Nanjing, was captured on 19 July 1864, their leader committed suicide, and 100 000 persons were massacred by the victors in Nanjing alone. The remainder of the Taipings withdrew and dispersed. The Taiping state had spent itself.
[22]
The Birth of the Soviet Revolution
Let us return to contemporary events. Chiang’s attack upon the Communists on 27 April had of course led to great bewilderment in the ranks of what remained of the members of Moscow’s party. They could no longer count on help from their natural ally, the left wing of the Guomindang, which having already formed its own government in Hankou in opposition to Chiang Kai-shek, and having begun by excluding the Communists from its own ranks, was then shortly afterwards in its turn destroyed by Chiang Kai-shek,
[23] who beginning from this time had become the only leader of both the Guomindang and of China.
It was then in these difficult circumstances that quite independently of the Communist Party, and in direct contradiction with the line followed by it until then, a Communist militant, who until then had been of the second rank, had a clear vision of what had to be done.
This man, who was called Mao Zedong, was the son of a farmer of Hunan,
[24] a province in that region south of the Blue River, where not so long before the Taiping had been so deeply rooted. He had been in disagreement with his party for a long time on two points. One was a political point: according to him, it was necessary to break with the Guomindang and to organise on a class basis,
[25] without any collaboration with the bourgeoisie; the other was a social point: this class basis must above all be not as the party leaders were proclaiming, amongst the workers of the cities, but amongst the peasants. They must arm the peasants, and they should take the land!
The state of decomposition in which the Communist Party found itself after the Shanghai massacre and the abortive Canton uprising enabled Mao to act independently in the direction he had always advocated, without troubling as to what the party high-ups might think or say. At the close of 1927, the Kremlin had dispatched a special mission to China charged not only with launching the Canton insurrection but also with ‘reorganising’ the Central Committee by placing at its head a new Moscow man, Li Lisan,
[26] whose main task was particularly to struggle against Mao’s ‘deviations'; so he and his friends were in constant antagonism with the official Moscow representatives until the day when their movement had acquired sufficient strength that it was hopeless to try to break them. At that time (1931), Li Li-san was recalled to Moscow, and there he remained for 15 years – until the arrival of Russian troops in Manchuria.
[27]
So acting contrary to the party directives, from the autumn of 1927, Mao took the initiative by assembling all he could find in order to constitute the nucleus of an armed force: the miners of Hanyang, the mutinous soldiers of Wuchang, and the local peasant militiamen of his own native province – all these together just forming a regiment. It was, however, an armed force sufficient to overcome the resistance of the local Guomindang forces, and to gain possession of an almost inaccessible mountain stronghold, a veritable natural fortress which had from time immemorial served as a refuge for bandits – to wit, Jinggangshan, on the boundary of Hunan and Jiangxi, in the very centre of what had been the Taiping state, in other words. Furthermore, Mao found there two bandit chiefs who readily joined him with their men, and thus raised his forces to nearly three regiments. Shortly afterwards, some of the troops of Nanchang in Jiangxi, who had revolted against the Guomindang on 1 August 1927, also joined him under the command of their own general, Zhu De.
[28]
It was Zhu De who was soon to become the military commander of the entire force, Mao himself thenceforth devoting himself to the political side of the movement. It was one of Mao’s brilliant insights that an armed force amounted to nothing of itself and that it was of no revolutionary value unless it immediately put into operation a political and social programme. As a consequence, Mao decided to establish at once in all the villages that made up the area occupied by his troops councils or soviets of peasants, and what was of still more importance, to proceed at once with the division of the land.
All these proceedings, as well as the formation of an autonomous army, were contrary to the ‘line’ of the party, and got him dismissed from all his posts within it.
Nonetheless, he continued on his way, and the more so as his forces were steadily growing. In greater or smaller numbers, the soldiers in many areas were rising in revolt against the Guomindang, which had now become the symbol of bourgeois reaction, and were joining the ranks of the Jiangxi ‘army of peasants and workers’.
The increase due to new arrivals was such that it was impossible for the 50 kilometres which formed the diameter of the Jinggangshan area to provide the means of subsistence for them all. They accordingly ascended into the plain, and little by little occupied all the southern part of Jiangxi.
This was too much. The Guomindang could no longer ignore the existence of these ‘bands’, and so it resolved to exterminate them. Accordingly, at the end of 1930, three years after the arrival of the first rebels in the province, a first great campaign was launched against the ‘army of the provincial Soviet Government of Jiangxi’. A hundred thousand men took part in this campaign on the side of the Guomindang, whilst Mao and his associates disposed of no more than 40 000 soldiers. After January 1931, however, the attack of the Guomindang was completely broken, and their troops were obliged to retire.
This success, like those which followed it, was largely due to the tactic introduced on this occasion by Zhu De, from which he never subsequently deviated, which consisted of refusing to engage in a war of position, of only accepting a war of movement, and in the course of this being far quicker than his adversary, so as to be able to group all his forces against only one section of the enemy troops, then to regroup them against another section, and so on.
[29] It was the tactic of Horatius against the Curatii.
[30] ‘Admitting the enemy troops deeply into Soviet territory’, Mao told the American journalist Edgar Snow, ‘we staged launched sudden concentrated attacks, in superior numbers, on isolated units of the Guomindang troops, achieving positions of manoeuvre in which, momentarily, we could encircle them, thus reversing the general strategic advantage enjoyed by a numerically greatly superior enemy.’
[31]
Four months later, the Guomindang reopened their campaign – this time with 200 000 men. The same tactics were employed by the Red Army, and the same defeat was inflicted on the Guomindang.
A month later a third campaign was opened up – this time with 300 000 men, and under the personal command of Chiang Kai-shek. Again the same tactics were used, and again there was the same defeat, ending in October 1931.
The Soviets were then to have nearly two years of respite, and they used them to extend the area of their territory, notably in Fujian, the adjoining province.
However, in April 1933, a fourth campaign was launched by the Guomindang. This, like the previous campaigns, terminated in disaster.
Some months later, in October, a fifth campaign was started. This time 400 000 men were engaged against a Red Army of 180 000 men, of which no more than 100 000 were armed. This time a new and more serious tactic was adopted.
What had particularly helped the Red Army’s strategy during the preceding campaigns was the fact that in their desire to encircle the ‘Reds’ to be able to annihilate them, the Guomindang forces divided themselves up into several columns which made for the centre of the enemy region by different routes in such a way as to enable Zhu De to attack them one at a time, and so destroy them in turn.
It appears that, on the advice of their German military advisers,
[32] the Guomindang generals in launching this fifth campaign adopted the tactic of blockade – that is, of blockading the Red territory by a whole system of blockhouses and fortifications, and then bombarding it with aircraft.
This new tactic was a hard blow for the small Soviet state. The Red troops could not hope to escape indefinitely suffocation in the interior of a circle which continually contracted, and from which they could not break out through lack of artillery. They succeeded, however, in holding out for a full year. According to the calculations of the Guomindang, it was a year during which a million men, civilian or military, died inside the Soviet zone, from military operations or from hunger.
Accordingly, the Soviet chiefs were eventually driven to the conclusion that if they were not to perish they must move out.
[33] It was then that they began their preparations for a ‘retreat’ that was one of the most extraordinary military exploits of all time.
The ‘Long March’
What they had decided to do was to evacuate Jiangxi completely, situated as it was, let us once more remind ourselves, in the south-east of China, and make their way with their own troops and even with the able-bodied civilian population to the region of Gansu and Shaanxi, to China’s extreme north-west, in other words, where a movement similar to that of Jiangxi had already been established for three years under the control of Liu Zhidan.
[34]
Between these two regions, there was a stretch of some 1200 kilometres as the crow flies, but there could be no question of passing from one region to another in a straight line, because for that it would be necessary to cross a great part of the Chinese plain where the immense armies of the Guomindang could easily overcome the small Soviet force. It was necessary to reach Shaanxi without hardly ever leaving the shelter of the mountains.
That is why, after breaking through the wall, or rather the successive walls of forts that surrounded them, in October 1934 the troops of Mao Zedong were to make a detour round the whole of China, by directing themselves in a straight line towards the west across Hunan and Guizhou, crossing the Blue River amid the mountains of Yunnan, then turning towards the north along the high mountains that border on Tibet towards Gansu, where they turned towards the north-east in order to establish themselves finally in the southern part of the great bend of the Yellow River on the borders of Gansu and Shaanxi.
Measured in a direct line, the distance covered altogether would be some 3000 kilometres, but in order to evade the enemy, or give him the slip, on several occasions it was necessary to double back, and even sometimes completely to retrace their steps, so that it is estimated that the actual distance traversed was actually about 9000 kilometres. These were 9000 kilometres without roads, often at very high altitudes, in freezing temperatures, and with aircraft whirling almost incessantly overhead, not to mention the skirmishes and pitched battles that had to be fought almost every day during the early part of the journey. By a curious coincidence, the most critical position in which Mao’s troops found themselves happened on the day when they had to cross the Dadu River in Sichuan, for it was in the gorges of this river that the last of the Taiping refugees had been exterminated after the fall of Nanjing.
Such was the ‘Long March’, a retreat that by far dwarfs that of the Ten Thousand, or of Napoleon from Russia.
[35]
It was to last for a year. On 20 October 1935, exactly a year after their departure from Jiangxi, Mao Zedong’s soldiers reached northern Shaanxi, which had already been sovietised by the troops of Liu Zhidan. Since all the Red forces, or almost all of them, now found themselves reunited, the state in Shaanxi now took the name of the
Chinese Soviet Republic of Workers and Peasants. A capital was established, first at Bao'an, and then at Yan'an, and they proceeded to distribute the land and to carry out military operations with the object of defending and extending the Soviet zone.
[36]
But soon China’s position abroad was going to lead to a complete transformation in the relations between the state of Shaanxi and the Guomindang. This transformation, which dates from the years 1936-37, was to close the first phase of the peasant revolution, the phase during which it was pure and untainted, and open up a second phase, during which it was to become far more national than peasant.
But we must now double back to follow the events abroad that led to the situation of 1936-37.
The Struggle Between Russia and Japan
When dealing with the subject of China’s foreign affairs, we ended with an account of the despatch of a European army against Beijing in 1900 after the Boxer Rising, and we noted that during the preceding period the slightest incident was enough for the European powers to exact from China veritable partitions of its sovereignty, but that on that occasion they had demanded little more of China.
In fact, the year 1900 marked the beginning of Europe’s decline. The fact was that from that date China had little more to fear from Western Europe. Indeed, the Western powers were more concerned to hold onto the privileges that they had already obtained, rather than to seek to extend them.
On the other hand, China’s two closest neighbours – Japan, now a great power, and Russia – were to follow in the footsteps of France, Britain and Germany in the race to dismember China. The conflicts between them and with China fill the history of this part of the world throughout the whole of the first half of our present century.
It was the same sort of story as that of the struggle of the Dutch and Portuguese for the possession of Indonesia, or of the British and the French for the possession of India. Even the very forms assumed by these clashes between Russia and Japan in their quarrels over China were the same as those assumed two centuries earlier in the clashes between Britain and France over India. Sometimes there were veritable wars, formally declared and widespread; sometimes there were undeclared wars, limited to local operations over the coveted territories.
The initial advantages in this struggle were gained by Russia. We saw how, at the end of Japan’s victorious war against China in 1895, the European powers had compelled it to abandon all it had conquered from China, and then obtained from China considerable gains for themselves. It was Russia which gained the biggest chunk in this affair. Not only did China lease to it Port Arthur, a remarkably well-protected outlet at the far end of the Liaodong peninsula commanding Beijing’s access to the sea (which Russia was later to develop into a great military port), along with all the adjoining territory (including Dalian, where it was to establish a great commercial port), but it was also given practically complete control over Manchuria.
Manchuria, the Pacific borderland of the Mongolian steppe, well watered due to its proximity to the ocean, crossed by two important rivers – the Sungari in the north, a tributary of the Amur, and the Liao in the south, which flows directly into the Yellow Sea – was, as its name indicates, the place where the Manchus lived.
It is a country where plains alternate with mountains, formerly covered with forests, that the Manchu emperors had for a long time sought to guard against the Chinese, in order, as it were, to preserve their ‘family property’ in its natural state. However, when Beijing had to remove the last of the restrictions against Chinese immigration under pressure from the land-hungry Chinese peasants in 1878, the land turned out to be of extraordinary fertility, whilst at the same time coal deposits were found in many places.
In 1896, Russia obtained the concession for a railway line crossing the whole of northern Manchuria from west to east, with the object of linking up Vladivostok with the Trans-Siberian railway; it later obtained the further concession for a railway crossing the whole of Manchuria from north to south linking up with the former line from Port Arthur at Harbin.
There was more to come. These railway concessions were accompanied by a grant of wide stretches of territory along the two lines, as well as all kinds of economic privileges, and finally Russia was given the right to station garrisons of troops in the regions conceded in order to ‘maintain order’. Thus Manchuria practically became part of Russian territory.
This was a mortal blow for the Japanese designs on China. The only base of departure which Japan could now use for the conquest of China was Korea. This country, which is separated from Japan by a strait of no more than 200 kilometres wide, has always served as a bridge between China and Japan. It was by way of Korea that Japan received its civilisation from China; it was there that China and Japan, in turn or simultaneously, exercised their political influence. As we have seen, Japan had garrisons stationed in Korea before the war of 1894, and it was only after landing in Korea that it attacked China, starting off from there.
It should be remembered that Korea is separated from China proper by the whole of southern Manchuria. The establishment of the Russians in Manchuria therefore meant a curtain falling between Japan and China. From now on, if it were to conquer China, Japan would have to pass over the bodies of the Russians.
The War in Manchuria and the Japanese Attempt on Shandong
In order to conquer China, Japan had therefore to carry out a preliminary operation – to eject the Russians from Manchuria, or at least from southern Manchuria. This is just what they did in 1904-05 in the course of the Manchurian War.
As we know, the Russians were beaten to their knees. They were beaten on land in great battles fought on the Manchurian plains, and they were beaten at sea when the rescue fleet that they had sent from Russia to reinforce the Siberian port of Vladivostok was sunk by the Japanese as it passed between Korea and Japan.
[37]
Under the Treaty of Portsmouth,
[38] the Russians were forced to cede to Japan all their rights in southern Manchuria and in the Liaodong Peninsula, retaining only the railway concession running from east to west in northern Manchuria and a 100-kilometre section between Harbin and Changchun on the north to south railway. All the rest of this line with all its supplementary concessions passed into the hands of the Japanese. Shortly afterwards, Japan secured its access to Manchuria by establishing a protectorate over Korea, which it annexed later on, in 1910.
Russia had thus lost the first round. Some years later, the war of 1914 was to give Japan the opportunity of venturing on a new step in the conquest of China.
It should be remembered that following the Sino-Japanese War of 1894, the Germans acquired on lease from China the magnificent bay of Jiaozhou at the base of the Shandong Peninsula, as well as rights and privileges in the interior of the peninsula that were just as extensive as those granted to the Russians in Manchuria.
Now since Japan had placed itself on the side of the ‘Allies’ during the First World War, it found itself on this account at war with Germany. It therefore took the opportunity of attacking Qingdao, of capturing it, and very soon of replacing the Germans in all their rights.
[39]
Holding at the same time Manchuria, which closed the Gulf of Jilin in the north, and Shandong, which closed it on the south, the Japanese now held the keys to Beijing, for they could now deprive Beijing and the north of all access to the sea. And having the keys to Beijing, they could soon hope eventually to control the whole of China.
But it was then that another non-European great power, a new one, the United States of America, came on the scene. In 1921, the USA convened an international conference in Washington for the purpose of regulating Chinese affairs. At that conference, the United States pressed vigorously for the principle of the ‘Open Door’. According to them, all states should abandon the special rights that they had wrested from China – ‘concessions’, leased territory, and so on – and so restore to China its full sovereignty; that they should cease exacting anything more from it, and that in turn China would deal with all states in the same manner, on a footing of complete equality.
As may well be imagined, America did not succeed in its argument, for none of its partners cared to abandon their ‘rights’. However, as the whole of Europe was allied with it against Japan, which had helped itself whilst Europe was preoccupied with its own affairs, it was decided that Japan must return to China what it had conquered from the Germans – the whole of Shandong – to which Japan finally had to agree.
[40]
As for Russia, it was first preoccupied with the war of 1914 and afterwards with its revolutions of 1917, and it remained almost inactive ever since its war with Japan. But this inactivity was soon to come to an end. Blocked in the West for the time being, it rapidly resumed its expansion in the East.
Russian Activity in Mongolia and Manchuria
Russia’s first attack took place in Mongolia. It is well known that although the Mongolian steppes are usually regarded as part of the Chinese empire, they have never been inhabited by the Chinese themselves, but only by the Mongols, who were nomadic shepherds.
When the last emperor of the Manchu Dynasty had to abdicate in 1912, the chiefs of the Mongol clans, who regarded the bond that united them to China as a bond of personal vassalage between themselves and the emperor, declared their independence. In spite of its weakness, the young Chinese republic might quite easily have forced them to return to the bosom of the empire, had not the Tsar of Russia immediately declared himself their protector and warned the Chinese against any interference, at least in that part of Mongolia most distant from China proper, which on that account became known as Outer Mongolia. Outer Mongolia had therefore become a Russian protectorate from the beginning of the First World War.
The revolution of 1917 of course put an end to the Tsarist domination over Mongolia, as it did everywhere else in Russia. China thereupon hastened to despatch a small garrison to Urga, the capital of Outer Mongolia, which installed itself there without difficulty. Shortly afterwards, however, one of the better-known chiefs of the reactionary bands that were fighting the power of the Soviets, Ungern,
[41] took refuge in Mongolia after having been pursued out of Siberia by Red troops. He expelled the Chinese garrison from Urga, and proclaimed himself the Grand Master of Mongolia. However, the Red troops soon caught up with him, defeated him, and on 21 July installed themselves in Mongolia as the Tsar’s successors. A ‘People’s Republic of Outer Mongolia’, the prototype of the ‘people’s republics’ of the same name and same type that were to flourish 25 years later in Eastern and Central Europe, was then set up. This republic was theoretically independent of Moscow, but in actual fact it was as completely dependent on it as any of the other so-called ‘republics’ of the Soviet Union.
This was the first negation of Lenin’s principle, according to which Soviet Russia in repudiating all imperialism was to abandon everything that Tsarist Russia had conquered or acquired abroad in the nature of territories, concessions, and so on.
[42] For the first time the USSR put on the imperialist boots of the Tsar. It was not to be the last!
However, in 1921 no less than in 1912, China, being completely in the grip of military anarchy, was incapable of any armed resistance to Russia, and no other power, not even Japan, cared to intervene in a country so far away. Beijing therefore left it alone. Some years later, the imperialism of the new Russian regime was to manifest itself in a still more striking manner. In Manchuria, just as in Outer Mongolia, the revolution of 1917 had the effect of eliminating Russian domination. The Chinese authorities accordingly recovered control of the northern railway that the Treaty of Portsmouth had awarded to the Russians.
The application of the principles of the October Revolution, as solemnly proclaimed, would have made it necessary for Soviet Russia to disclaim any right to this concession made to the Tsar, and on the contrary should plainly give it back to China, just as had been done with the Tsarist concessions in Iran at the beginning of the revolution.
[43]
But it did no such thing. In 1924 – that is to say, at a time when the Russian Revolution, already seven years old, was gradually giving way to the Stalinist counter-revolution – the Russian government negotiated an agreement with China, which was still largely in military anarchy, under which the east-to-west railway of northern Manchuria, called ‘The Chinese Eastern Railway’, was again to be transferred to Russia, with the sole reservation that there was to be no political right added to this purely ‘commercial’ concession.
[44]
Five years later, when the Guomindang had put an end to military anarchy and had reconstructed the Chinese state, one of its first acts, in July 1929, was naturally to refuse to recognise the agreements made by Russia with the dujun, to throw out the Russian railway officials, and to install Chinese in their place.
Then Russia, even though it was still declaring itself to be anti-imperialist, employed the classic methods of all the imperialist states to ensure that its ‘rights’ should be respected, and with the applause of the bourgeois and colonialist press of the entire world, it sent its troops over the Chinese frontier and cut to pieces two Chinese divisions, which enabled it to secure the restitution of its ‘concession’ from Nanjing, which was still incapable of sustaining a war against Russia.
For the second time, and in far more serious circumstances than in Mongolia, because this time it was a question of a country inhabited by Chinese against which armed force had been used, so-called Soviet Russia put on the imperialist boots of the Tsar.
[45]
New Japanese Intervention in Manchuria
Two years after this serious conflict with Russia, another more serious one was to break out between China and this time Japan.
Japan was just as sensitive to Russia’s penetration into Manchuria in 1930 as it had been in 1905. Japan therefore decided to intervene once more. Its intervention took place in two stages. In the first stage, it was confined to Manchuria; in the second, it spread throughout the whole of China. In both cases, it was carefully calculated to happen at the very moment when those who might be able to oppose it, Europe and America, found themselves in a difficult situation that forbade any faraway adventures.
In 1931, the whole West was grappling with a grave economic crisis. This crisis had broken out two years earlier in America, since when it had steadily worsened and eventually spread to Europe;
[46] France, which was the last to be affected, had now also entered into crisis. Since from then on every state was exclusively preoccupied with its own problems, Japan felt that it could go its own way. And this is what it did.
On 18 September 1931, almost without any resistance, Japanese troops expelled the Chinese troops from their garrisons in Manchuria, and installed themselves in their place.
[47] Within a month, the Japanese were in occupation of the whole of Manchuria, both north and south. They might easily have annexed the province. However, as they regarded the occupation not as an end in itself, but as a step in the direction of conquering the whole of China, they decided, after adding to it the adjacent province of Rehe, to set it up as the so-called independent state of Manchukuo under the sovereignty of the former Emperor of China, who had hitherto lived in retirement in Beijing in accordance with the conditions of his abdication.
[48]
Just as the Guomindang authorities had left the Russians with a free hand previously, so now they left the Japanese to do as they pleased, and for the same reason, that they were as little able to oppose the Japanese with armed force now as they had formerly been unable to oppose the Russians. They contented themselves with an appeal to the League of Nations, which in its turn limited itself to ‘condemning’ the Japanese action. Gone with the wind...
[49]
It was fairly clear, however, that the Nanjing government was not altogether displeased with the action of Japan. There were two reasons for this, one general and one particular.
The general reason was that a great many members of the Guomindang, headed by Sun Yat-sen’s most faithful disciple, Wang Jingwei,
[50] had always been advocates of a close union with Japan, which according to them, as it was for Sun Yat-sen, was the only means of struggling successfully against white domination.
This general reason was supplemented by a particular motive of internal policy. Chiang Kai-shek was in his third campaign against the ‘Communists’ of Jiangxi; he could hardly disguise the fact that in spite of the massacres of Shanghai and Canton, Communism remained a force in China, the more so because Jiangxi had its imitators all over, and that at several points they were attempting to set up similar soviet republics. Now since there was the risk at any time that the Chinese Communists might be supported by the Russians, the Communist danger and the Russian danger were closely inter-related in the eyes of the men of Nanjing. In order to protect themselves internally against ‘Communism’, that is to say, against a division of the land, it was necessary to protect themselves externally against the Russians as well. What better protection could they find against the Russians than that of the Japanese army? By occupying Manchuria and Rehe, the Japanese were covering China’s northern frontier; henceforth the Russians could only approach Beijing after crushing the Japanese army.
From this originated the Guomindang’s policy of tacit acquiescence in the Japanese aggression and in their detaching of Manchuria from China and setting it up as a Japanese protectorate.
We have now reached the time when we interrupted our narrative of China’s internal affairs, round about 1935 when Mao Zedong’s army had installed itself in Shaanxi. Beginning from then, we will have to deal with China’s internal affairs in parallel with foreign affairs, for these now become intimately and indissolubly bound together.
The End of the Soviets
The reaction of the Jiangxi soviets to the Japanese aggression of 1931 had naturally been the opposite to that of the Nanjing government. In the face of the new occupation of Manchuria by the Japanese, the government of Mao Zedong became fiercely threatening, and had even gone so far as officially declaring war against Japan. It was, however, a platonic declaration, for Jiangxi was almost 2000 kilometres distant from Manchuria, and was separated from it by the entire forces of the Guomindang. But as soon as the ‘Long March’ had led the Jiangxi troops into Shaanxi, the menace from Japan became less platonic, for there were now no more than 1000 kilometres between the two ‘belligerents’, which were basically located in the same peripheral region.
But Chiang Kai-shek had not given up hope of exterminating the ‘Reds’. What he had not succeeded in doing in Jiangxi, he might well do in Shaanxi. He therefore began preparations for a new campaign of extermination, his sixth, and despatched a fresh army against the troops of Mao Zedong. The man he placed in charge was the son of Zhang Zuolin,
[51] the former dujun of Manchuria; he had succeeded his father as governor of the province, and had been forced to flee on the arrival of the Japanese. He was generally called ‘The Young Marshal’ in memory of his father, and to distinguish him from the latter.
Now some time after their arrival in Shaanxi, and when direct communication had been re-established with Moscow, Mao Zedong and his companions, no doubt under pressure from the Kremlin, completely changed their policy.
It was now no longer a matter, or hardly the case, of agrarian reform and of a struggle against the landowners on the part of the ‘Republic of Yan'an’, and even less of a struggle against the Guomindang, it was now only a question of struggling against Japan. The ‘Communists’ became the protagonists of a ‘national union’: all Chinese, irrespective of their class or political affiliations, must unite in a life and death struggle against the Japanese. The revolution was to be shelved once more, in order to advance the interests of Russian foreign policy.
So the Kremlin had finally triumphed. It forced Mao Zedong from then on to carry out the policy against which he had rebelled before 1927, and the exact opposite of which he had since done.
By drawing close to the Russian frontier, the Chinese revolutionary army had secured its supplies of arms and munitions, but he who pays the piper calls the tune. It now had to obey the orders of the Moscow Political Bureau.
The propaganda of the Shaanxi men in favour of this new national front was naturally directed above all at those whom it was most urgent to convince: the soldiers facing them, the soldiers of the ‘Young Marshal’. This patriotic propaganda, carried on by leaflets and by sending back brainwashed prisoners, etc, was not slow in bearing fruit. A year after the troops of Mao Zedong had arrived in Shaanxi, almost the whole of the army of the Young Marshal, and especially the officers, had been won over to the idea of a common front with the Communists against Japan. So much so that, on a December day in 1936 when Chiang Kai-shek arrived at the headquarters of the Young Marshal to discuss the final preparations to be made for his final extermination campaign, the Young Marshal had Chiang Kai-shek purely and simply arrested! This was a stroke that no-one in Europe could understand at the time, for nothing was known of the propaganda of the Communists in Shaanxi, or even of their existence there.
What followed was still more extraordinary. The Young Marshal, along with his officer corps, had arrested Chiang with the intention of executing him for treason, because of his non-resistance to the Japanese aggression; they were about to proceed with the execution in the most expeditious manner when officers of the Red Army arrived on the scene. They came to demand that far from executing Chiang Kai-shek, he should be freed and sent back with apologies to Nanjing.
[52]
And that is what happened. Moscow had saved the killer of Shanghai! The reason for this strange gesture lay in the fact that if Chiang Kai-shek had been executed, there would no longer be any possibility of any ‘national unity’. Far from seeking to destroy the Guomindang, it should be carefully preserved so that the policy of alliance and collaboration with the bourgeoisie, such as had existed before 1927, might be restored, and this time directed, not against the dujun and Britain, but against Japan, which since Russia had taken over the Tsarist project in Manchuria had again become Russia’s Enemy Number One.
Furthermore, in order to save the face of the head of the government, Chiang Kai-shek was released, officially without conditions; in fact the following trade-off had been concluded: Chiang promised to adopt a policy of active resistance towards Japan, and to stop the war against the Communists; on the other hand, Mao Zedong was to stop carrying out the expropriation of the landowners.
The agreement was kept on both sides. In addition to its pro-Japanese faction, the Guomindang had always included a group of men favourable to Europe and America. Chiang Kai-shek could therefore change his policy completely without leaving the Guomindang; all he had to do was to make a change of personnel. In particular, the key post of Minister of Foreign Affairs, which until then had been held by a notoriously pro-Japanese, was quite simply given to an adherent of the opposing group.
[53] On the other side, there was no longer any question of ‘soviets’ in the territories occupied by the troops of Mao Zedong, nor any more talk of giving the land to those who worked it, and the Communist army was officially no more than the Eighth Chinese Army.
Beginning from that time, the Chinese Revolution lost its social character in order to assume an exclusively national character. The peasant revolution was at an end, and was starting to change into another type of revolution, a revolution of the Russian type.
The Japanese Response
This naturally changed everything for Japan. That is why, from the moment it became clear that Chiang Kai-shek’s turn had become definitive, Japan opened up the second phase of its offensive.
Moreover, it was a propitious moment. The war in Spain was in full swing, and all eyes in Europe were on Hitler’s actions. The economic crisis that had favoured the first Japanese intervention was over, but it was replaced with a still graver political crisis whose only outcome could be the war of 1939. Japan could therefore play with confidence. Even more than in 1931, it could be sure that Europe, and consequently also America, would not intervene.
On 15 July 1937, Japan therefore sent an ultimatum to China demanding independence for the Tsetsehar province of Inner Mongolia and for Hebei, the province of Beijing itself. Japan thus intended to set itself up as master in China’s old capital, from where it would be easy to spread its dominion over the whole of the basin of the Yellow River. This would be a return to the time of the Middle Ages, when China had been divided between two states – one or several barbarian states in the north, and a Chinese state in the south, confined to only the basin of the Blue River. It is hardly likely that even before Chiang Kai-shek’s arrest the Guomindang would have agreed to such a forfeiture of its rights, and in any case, since the volte-face of December 1936, there could be no further question of it. This time China would fight. Nanjing therefore rejected the ultimatum, and Japan attacked for the second time.
[54]
Japan’s military successes were at first rapid and considerable. The ultimatum was dated 15 July; the Japanese entered Beijing on the 29th; descending southwards, they occupied Shandong, and by November had become masters of the basin of the Blue River; there they occupied Shanghai and Nanjing, from which the Chinese government was forced to flee; and finally, in the following year, they captured Canton.
But here their progress ended. Beijing, Nanjing and Canton are all in the coastal area; the Japanese were incapable of deeply penetrating the interior, much less of establishing themselves there. The Communists held Shaanxi all the time, and even Shanxi further east; and if the Japanese succeeded in getting as far as Hangzhou on the Blue River, all their efforts to push further inland, to Chongqing, for example, which was Chiang Kai-shek’s new capital, proved in vain right to the end. The great mass of mainland China, north, south and centre alike, remained outside their control.
And as early as the middle of 1938, it became clear that Japan had embarked upon an adventure that was beyond its means. It had become entangled in China, and was becoming more entangled every day. The moment was therefore very propitious for Russia, its imperialist rival, to press its claims. Without involving itself too deeply, as was Stalin’s wont, Russia began to explore the terrain, and if fighting broke out, it would be without a declaration of war.
That is why during one fine day in the summer of 1938, Russian troops from Siberia quietly and unostentatiously occupied a small hill on the Russo-Manchurian border which until then had always been considered as Manchurian. The Japanese troops counter-attacked, reoccupied the hill, and set a guard over it, but during the following year similar incidents occurred further west, on the Mongol-Siberian frontier, which led to pitched air and land battles between the two armies.
[55]
It was in fact a war between the two empires, but on a limited scale, and unofficial. Whilst the soldiers of the two respective countries were fighting it out, the ambassadors of Moscow and Tokyo continued with their normal relations with the government, in fact an enemy government, to which they were accredited. It needed a world war and its prelude, the Hitler-Stalin Pact, to put an end to these conflicts, for it was obvious that Russia, now Hitler’s ally, could not continue to fight with Japan, Hitler’s friend.
[56]
During the world war, the situation in China remained generally slack. Japan was only able to hold its positions with great difficulty, not only because from the end of 1941 it had to fight against America in the Pacific,
[57] but also because America was bringing to Chiang Kai-shek’s troops, firstly by airlifts, and then by the Burma Road expressly built for that purpose, a flood of munitions, materials and supplies of all sorts. Japan, however, succeeded in holding on, and it was only after collapsing on its own territory, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
[58] that it finally let go of China. In the course of the last few days of the war, Russia officially declared war on Japan, and its forces were sent into Manchuria to make a dance of triumph.
[59]
The Second Break with the Guomindang
The utter disappearance of a common enemy against whom an alliance has been concluded breaks the alliance. Japan’s defeat in China therefore led to the end of the ‘national union’. The ‘Reds’ and the Guomindang from that moment reverted to their well-known game of ‘who could eliminate the other’. America, which is often unrealistic, attempted to reconcile the two antagonists, and with this end in view sent its great wartime leader Marshall, the Chief of the General Staff, but it was only too predictable that his efforts would prove unavailing.
[60] Only the hazard of arms could determine who was the stronger.
The war between the two parties, at first sporadic, little by little became general. Starting from their base in Shaanxi, where they had fixed their capital, Yan'an, the Communists rapidly spread like wildfire over the whole of the extreme north-east of China, soon occupying Kalgan on Beijing’s north-west, along with a great part of Manchuria. Finally, at the end of May 1948, they launched their great offensive: to begin with, they completed the conquest of Manchuria by the capture of Mukden on 1 November 1948, and then, descending southwards, they defeated in succession all the armies that the Guomindang sent against them; they entered Beijing without a shot being fired on 1 February 1949, and successfully negotiated the crossing of the Blue River at the end of April 1949; the occupation of the rest of China was no more to them than a military parade. The only choice left for the Guomindang government was to take refuge on Formosa, the island Japan had seized from China in 1895, which had been placed under Chinese administration in 1945, pending the conclusion of a peace treaty with Japan.
Here the latest of China’s revolutionary periods comes to an end, the one that began with the opening of the present century. A new epoch now begins, which will doubtless not only be a chapter in China’s history, but rather a chapter in world history, for the fate of China, linked with Russia’s, has now become inseparable from the fate of the world.
A (Provisional) Conclusion
About 50 years ago, the Chinese, for what reason I do not know, had bombarded the little Russian town of Blagovestchensk over the border. Réclus wrote: ‘The Chinese will be all the more respected in the future now that they are better able to defend themselves.’
[61] Prophetic words!
When Réclus expressed himself in this way, at the time of the Boxer Rising, the Chinese had only just begun to defend themselves. It may be said that since then they have not stopped defending themselves in a thousand different ways, but always with more potent means and always on a greater scale. Every transformation of their internal regime in the course of this last half-century has had as its aim and result the growth in the power of their military forces. From the handful of Boxers assassinating an ambassador in the streets of Beijing to the millions of men in the present Chinese army who came to fight in Korea against the United Nations coalition,
[62] it has been an immense road that they have traversed. When on the morrow of the Second World War, the United States allowed China to enter the Council of the Five Great Powers with a permanent seat and the right of veto on the Security Council, the Europeans could still smile and only see there a gesture of flattery in Asia’s direction; but it would be difficult for them to do it now. China has
reallybecome a Great Power, and it is far more capable of defending its independence today than other so-called great powers like France and Britain; it is now China that can smile when it sees the representatives of these two states sitting side by side with it in equality.
Thus, in conquering Asia, the West has Europeanised it; and once Europeanised, Asia has dispensed with Europe and become its rival.
The period of history that opened in the sixteenth century when the Europeans discovered a sea route to the Middle and Far East which aroused their covetousness, a phase marked by the increasing subjection of Asia to Europe, is thus definitely at an end. It has come to an end, and a new phase is beginning.
But what will this mean as far as China is concerned? Is that highly dialectical aspect represented by the phase that has now ended also going to mark the phase that is now opening up?
The origin of Mao Zedong’s movement was incontestably a popular revolution, and even more particularly a popular revolution of the classic Chinese type – a revolution of ‘vagabonds’. But how many successful revolutions have not been able to keep the character they had at the beginning after their victory!
The October Revolution in Russia was a workers’ revolution; it was made by the workers who wanted to exercise power directly by means of the soviets that they had created, and to be the masters of production in the factories they had seized. It was also, in a subsidiary sense, a revolt of the peasants, who no longer wanted to fight for imperialist aims, and who wanted to become owners of the land they cultivated. We know what transpired: the regime that emerged from the revolution is the most anti-working class and anti-peasant regime there has ever been, a dictatorship of imperialist managers.
Broadly speaking, it can be said that all Russian revolutionary activity for a century, from the Decembrists
[63] to 1917, had two objectives: the abolition of despotism and the emancipation of the workers; this activity has now finally ended up with the installation of a yet more absolute despotism than that of the Tsar, and with the establishment of servitude for the peasants and workers.
It can therefore be asked if a like fate is not in store for the Chinese Revolution of 1927, or even if it has not already come about.
None of the peasant revolutions which we have seen take place in the long course of Chinese history has ever ended in the installation of a peasant regime. Their only result has been that after they had overturned the established power, the gate was found opened for a barbarian invasion.
Isn’t it going to be the same this time as well? Will not the sole result of the 1927 peasant movement be simply to open up China to the intrusion of a new barbarian, coming again to it from the north, Russia? But the Russian is not the Mongol, so it cannot be expected that the following events will proceed on parallel lines.
China, which has always very rapidly sinicised its barbarian masters, has often provoked admiration at its powers of ‘assimilation’, but there is no reason for this astonishment. If the Chinese have always easily assimilated their invaders, it is not because of a capacity for assimilation that is peculiar to the Chinese people, but is due only to the fact that the invader was the bearer of a civilisation inferior to the Chinese civilisation, since it is always the superior civilisation that assimilates the inferior.
But if it is true today that the Russian is a barbarian just as the Mongol was as far as the Chinese is concerned, because he possesses a different civilisation, this civilisation is no longer inferior, but superior to Chinese civilisation; industrial civilisation is superior to irrigational civilisation. Therein lies the difference; the assimilation of the Russian by the Chinese cannot be expected.
The fact is that two civilisations now find themselves side by side in China: the civilisation of irrigated cultivation, closely bound to the soil, which is a great civilisation, which as long as the Yellow and the Blue Rivers continue to exist, cannot fail to play an essential rôle in the life of the Chinese people; and on the other hand, industrial civilisation, for which China’s underground mineral resources will no doubt hold out a brilliant future, but a quite different one.
What is to be the outcome? A synthesis? The fusion of these two opposing civilisations into a new civilisation of a superior type? Perhaps. But that is not certain. Both these civilisations have one thing in common: they are both of them ‘mature’ civilisations. In fact, Chinese civilisation exhausted its potential long ago; it lives, but it no longer develops; it remains strongly rooted, but it no longer creates. As for industrial civilisation, the Russians are going to implant it in China in the same form in which they themselves practice it – in other words, in its degenerate form, that of state capitalism.
Can syntheses be born from the contact of civilisations that are already on the descending line of their curve? This hardly seems probable to me. The new China will therefore undoubtedly merely become submerged in the general process which is leading the world towards its decline.
In any case, for the moment, we can only say that the immense revolutionary movement that has shaken China since the beginning of this century, which in its different phases and its diverse groupings has always had as its common denominator the will to shake off the foreigner, and the white foreigner in particular, looks as if it will result in placing the Chinese people under a foreign white domination that is infinitely stricter, more imperious and more ferocious than those from which it has been China’s preoccupation to free itself in the past.
Just as all countries which have had to suffer foreign exploitation by means of private capitalism, and in this respect very unlike Japan, which was never subjected to colonisation by private European capitalism, as a means of industrialising itself China has opted for state capitalism, which since it is of the state, seems better able to protect it from foreign capitalism. But in opting for state capitalism, it is thereby linked to Russian state capitalism, and hence to the Russian state, infinitely closer than it would have been to the Western states, in spite of the ‘concessions’ which it would have been constrained to grant to their nationals.
Such is the second dialectical feature of the Chinese Revolution. A revolution made to extricate itself from the grip of the foreigner has resulted in its very development in a stronger foreign embrace.
We may well ask if the future does not hold in store for us the spectacle of a third, equally dialectical, phase.
In order to industrialise itself, China has today gone to school in dependence on Russia, but on the day when it becomes fully industrialised, will it not rid itself of those who have industrialised it, just as, thanks to its Europeanisation, it rid itself of those who Europeanised it?
The result of the Westernisation of China has been to free China from the West; will not the result of its Russification be to free it from Russia?
Just as China’s Heraclitus,
[64] the great Lao Zi, proclaimed: ‘Because of its own condition, each thing is in danger of becoming its opposite.’
[65]
