Chiang Kai-shek’s First Coup

A CCP member, Li Zhilong, who had been promoted to the leading position in the Navy Department of the new government, was thought by Chiang Kai-shek to be planning to capture him and send him on a ship as far away as Vladivostok in response to rumours of Chiang’s attempt to replace Li Zhilong with his own stooge. If this had happened it would have meant that a CCP member, breaking ranks with the intolerable line of the leadership, would have dealt a powerful blow to the right wing, as Chiang Kai-shek would then have been completely out of action.

If it is true that Li Zhilong planned this abduction, it was the first of three crucial moments in which the CCP had a favourable military opportunity to move decisively against Chiang Kai-shek as a counterrevolutionary. The other two opportunities both involved the radicalised Guomindang army commander Xue Yue, who in 1927 and again in 1936 offered to arrest Chiang Kai-shek for the CCP, which criminally rejected his proposal on both occasions.

After having foiled this supposed plot by arresting Li, Chiang Kai-shek, like a true military man and bonapartist, seized the initiative and took power in a coup in which the Guomindang leftwing as well as the CCP were openly defeated. He used the cover of darkness to secure all positions of power over the mass movement with his military forces, so that by the next morning his power was already cemented, leading to utter confusion and demoralisation both amongst the left Guomindang and the CCP.

The reactionary, counterrevolutionary character of this plot was expressed in its strategy – hundreds of communists were arrested, the strike committee headquarters were raided, left Guomindang political and military figures were also arrested, and all Soviet advisors were now under house arrest. And yet Stalin still refused to draw the conclusions, and he hid news of this embarrassment for his strategy from the whole Comintern for a year, sowing massive confusion among Chinese communists who did not know that ‘their man’ in the Guomindang had just organised a counterrevolutionary coup. This act alone proves that responsibility for the defeat of the CCP in 1925-7 lies in Moscow. And still after this Borodin and the Comintern accepted Chiang’s ridiculous and pathetic ‘apology’ for this ‘mistaken action’, gave him advice and continued to supply him with arms!

The ‘left’ Guomindang, under Wang Jinwei’s leadership, lost no time in fulfilling their role as little more than left-phraseologists puffed up only by the magnificent mass movement that lay beneath them. This movement having suffered a temporary setback, Wang Jingwei and the other Guomindang leaders not in Chiang’s camp knew not what to do, and so literally fled the scene, leaving Chiang’s authority utterly unchallenged, like an omen of Hitler’s rise to power seven years later, to which the communists and social democrats immediately capitulated without a fight. The Guomindang Executive Committee merely asked that Chiang ‘recognise his mistake’. Considering his coup’s extraordinary success, that would seem an unlikely conclusion for Chiang to draw.

The disorientation that followed in the ranks of the CCP is testament to the necessity of developing a correct Marxist, materialist perspective, through a democratic discussion, as to future developments in the class struggle. After all, revolutionary parties should be preparing for nothing other than dramatic changes in the situation such as this.

Two months after Chiang’s coup was established, the meeting of the Guomindang Central Executive Committee approved resolutions subordinating the entirety of the Guangzhou regime to Chiang Kai-shek’s personal power. Chiang himself moved resolutions aimed at exploiting the CCP’s policy of subservience – now all CCP members had to ‘not entertain any doubt on or criticise Sun Yat Sen or his principles’. A list of all Communists within the Guomindang was to be given to Chiang (and on Borodin’s orders the CCP speedily supplied him with this list), Communists were to be bureaucratically restricted in the number of posts they could hold, and a ‘joint party committee’ was to be set up to review all instructions from the CCP Central Committee! To voluntarily hand over your membership list to a newly established military dictator is a blunder of extraordinary proportions.

These alarming developments put to the test the relationship of the CCP to the Comintern, which constantly acted over the heads of the Chinese communists to secure what it wanted. Isaacs quotes Tang Liang Li as reporting that following this meeting in which Chiang openly attacked the CCP “Chiang’s relations with Borodin became more cordial than ever”. No doubt Borodin felt that he was having a decisive influence over Chiang Kai-shek, just like all yes-men entertain delusions of grandeur for telling their boss only what they want to hear.

We have, however, been a little one sided so far in neglecting the internal opposition of the CCP to Borodin’s (Stalin’s) policies. It is hardly surprising that there would be opposition to all this, given the CCP’s initial opposition to the Guomindang and its Bolshevik foundation, and given that Borodin, according to Chen Duxiu, said to the Chinese communists “the Communists should do coolie service for the Guomindang!”

Attempts to Break with the Guomindang

The CCP, formed as a party of revolutionary struggle against imperialism and capitalism and for a classless society, could hardly accept a policy of carrying out coolie service! For more than a year leading up to this leading members and bodies of the CCP had been trying to break with the Guomindang, and were halted by the Comintern. In August 1924, shortly before he died, Sun Yat Sen ordered that the Guomindang Central Committee place a review over all Comintern orders to the CCP. According to Peng Shuzhe this was sufficient to set the alarm bells ringing,

“Tsai Ho-sen told me about Sun’s motion regarding Guomindang review of all Comintern resolutions and orders to the CCP and asked what I thought about it. “Has the Central Committee accepted this demand?” I asked. Tsai replied “they are thinking it over now.” “The Central Committee must refuse Sun’s demand,” I said strongly, “otherwise, our party will become a mere appendage to the Guomindang.” Tsai talked this over with Chen Duxiu, and they sent a telegram to Qu Qiubai ordering him to refuse Sun’s demand.”

He continues,

“After this, I presented three formal resolutions to the Central Committee: (1) we should assume a critical attitude toward the policies and activities of the Guomindang; (2) we must renew our local party organisations everywhere...(3) we should establish a Labour Movement Committee in order to plan for and lead the national workers’ movement. The Central Committee adopted these resolutions.” (Peng Shuzhi, Introduction to Leon Trotsky on China)

This was followed up with a resolution which passed the CCP’s Fourth National Congress in January 1925, which called “for proletarian leadership of the revolution, and plans were made to rebuild and develop the workers’ movement of the entire nation...This congress marked the return of the CCP to Bolshevism” (Ibid). According to Gregor Benton,

“At the CCP’s Third Congress in June 1923, there was almost a majority for an amendment calling for an independent workers’ party, but Sneevliet fought back and won the vote. In 1924, Chen Duxiu, Cai Hesen, and Mao Zedong actually advocated a break with the Guomindang and wrote to all committees and cells preparing them to vote for one. But Borodin and Voitinsky, representing the Comintern, were against the idea, so again nothing came of it...In October 1925, after the right wing of the Guomindang had begun to oppose the Communists’ presence in the Guomindang, Chen Duxiu is said to have proposed that “we should prepare ourselves immediately to withdraw from the Guomindang and become independent,” but once again his proposal was defeated. In July 1926 [i.e. a few months after Chaing’s coup] he called one more time for withdrawal; again the Comintern rejected him.” (Benton, China’s Urban Revolutionaries)

This burgeoning opposition in China, mirroring the development of the Left-Opposition in Russia, explains why the Comintern had to keep the fact of Chiang Kai-shek’s coup hidden from the Chinese Communists outside of Guangzhou as well as from the International. It was even necessary for Borodin to undermine the democratic rights of the CCP by demanding that “the question of leaving the Guomindang must be agreed upon by the left wing of the Guomindang” (quoted by Peng Shuzhi, op cit.). This statement is a tacit admission that the Comintern wished to dissolve the CCP, that it was by now really only a bargaining chip in their relations with the Chinese bourgeoisie. So desperate was Stalin for the CCP not to break with the ‘national bourgeoisie’ that he was chasing after it even after the bourgeoisie itself had broken with the CCP! The imposition of the Comintern on the CCP in these months laid the foundations for the development of a Trotskyist left opposition within the CCP.

Now that Chiang’s power was cemented and the possibility of any communist opposition, which he clearly feared, was dealt with, he began once again to show a left face and to organise the ‘Northern Expedition’, a war against the militarist warlords that controlled the rest of the country.

What should have been the attitude of the communists to this expedition? Despite Chiang Kai-shek’s reactionary, counterrevolutionary role in the Chinese revolution, which was by now an established fact, the content of this war under his leadership was progressive or even revolutionary, as Trotsky correctly argued at the time,

“China is an oppressed semicolonial country. The development of the productive forces of China, which is proceeding in capitalist forms, demands the shaking off of the imperialist yoke. The war of China for its national independence [i.e. the Northern Expedition] is a progressive war, because it flows from the necessities of the economic and cultural development of China itself, as well as because it facilitates the development of the revolution of the British proletariat and that of the whole world proletariat.

“But this by no means signifies that the imperialist yoke is a mechanical one, subjugating ‘all’ the classes of China in the ‘same’ way. The powerful role of foreign capital in the life of China has caused very strong sections of the Chinese bourgeoisie, the bureaucracy, and the military to join their destiny with that of imperialism” (Trotsky, Problems of the Chinese Revolution)

But since the so-called national bourgeoisie and the compradore and imperialist bourgeoisie will always put aside their differences for the sake of the common aim of defeating the workers movement, the Guomindang’s leadership of the Northern Expedition, whilst not altering the overall progressive character of that war, acted to limit the progressive outcome of the Northern Expedition’s victory by using it only as credit with which to buy a better deal with the imperialists to continue exploiting Chinese workers and peasants,

“The bourgeoisie participated in the national war as an internal brake, looking upon the worker and peasant masses with growing hostility and becoming ever readier to conclude a compromise with imperialism.

“Installed within the Guomindang and its leadership, the national bourgeoisie has been essentially an instrument of the compradors and imperialism. It can remain in the camp of the national war only because of the weakness of the worker and peasant masses...the lack of independence of the Chinese Communist Party, and the docility of the Guomindang in the hands of the bourgeoisie.” (Ibid)

That the bourgeoisie could only support and lead the Northern Expedition on the basis of the weakness of any communist opposition is proven by the fact that Chiang Kai-shek would not launch it without Borodin and the Comintern’s ‘advice’ and ‘support’. Of course Chiang was happy to show a left face in words in order to secure CCP backing and material aid from the Soviet Union, which came no-strings-attached. Undoubtedly Chiang’s pleas for support filled Moscow with joy as proof that they had won an ally against the West. This was true only in the negative sense, i.e. that Chiang Kai-shek and the bourgeoisie were too weak to rule without the unquestioning aid of the Comintern, and without shackling in advance the workers’ leaders. This is proof of the potential power of the Comintern and CCP. But that one has voluntarily submitted to one’s own imprisonment is not a manifestation of actual strength but of fatal and foolish weakness.

The Comintern’s backing of the Northern Expedition coincided with the implementation of martial law and the “forbidding of all labour disturbances for the duration of the Northern Expedition” which apparently amounted to “treason against the Guomindang.”  Workers in Guangzhou, against the CCP leadership (which had of course submitted to and authorised the martial law), defended themselves against the shutting down of their unions, for which more than fifty workers sacrificed their lives.

Negotiations with the Imperialists and the Beginning of the Northern Expedition

Proof that absolute control over the Northern Expedition was necessary not for its unconditional triumph but to make deals with the imperialists in freedom, using the war as a bargaining chip, arrived as early as the war itself begun,

“A few days after the adjournment of the May plenary session of the Central Executive Committee of the Guomindang [i.e. the one that initiated the attack on the CCP following Chiang’s coup], the Guangzhou government officially approached Hong Kong [the British] to reopen negotiations. The British readily agreed. The delegates met in July [by now the Northern Expedition had begun].” (Isaacs, op cit.)

The negotiations led by the Guomindang, ostensibly to achieve the demands of the still striking Guangzhou workers for British withdrawal from Hong Kong, resulted only in the removal of some of the British gunboats outside Guangzhou harbour, which incidentally had by now already been used to break up the picket lines on the docks. So under the terms of Chiang’s martial law, which ended the strike on the pretext that the Guomindang could thereby negotiate better with imperialism and wage a war against the Warlords, none of the demands of the revolutionary movement were met. The British could not only stay in Hong Kong, but had now established friendly ‘connections’ with Chiang Kai-shek’s regime. The ending of the strike wave also enabled the routing of all other strikes and workers’ organisations in general, and with this came the loss of the material gains workers in the area had made.

If it was an error to give Chiang unconditional backing for his adventure against the northern Warlords, it would equally have been a mistake to oppose outright the Northern Expedition simply because it was led by Chiang Kai-shek and the Guomindang. Marxists must always proceed from what is, not what we would like things to be, in order that we be able to make things how we would like them to be. And it was a fact both that the war was objectively progressive, aimed as it was against the feudal/compradore warlords and imperialists, and at the same time that it was led by counterrevolutionaries. In such situations revolutionaries must participate in the struggle side by side with the masses also participating in it with the aim of winning the masses away from bourgeois leadership to a revolutionary proletarian one. That millions of workers and peasants voluntarily fought in the war against the Warlords is a sign both of the objectively progressive character of the war and that an opportunity existed for the CCP to win leadership of the movement away from Chiang Kai-shek.

What strategy then should the CCP have pursued? As we pointed out earlier, there is a close historical parallel between the relationship of the Russian Social Revolutionaries to the Russian Revolution and the Bolsheviks, and the Guomindang’s relationship to the Chinese Revolution and the CCP. Just as in the turmoil of the Russian Revolution the Social Revolutionaries split into a left and a right-wing, the former representing the more radicalised poorer peasants and urban petty bourgeoisie, the latter more the Kulaks, so the Guomindang had its right-wing, headed by Chiang Kai-shek and based around the need to wipe out the CCP to conclude a more favourable deal for the big bourgeoisie with imperialism, and its left-wing, headed by Wang Jingwei and more favourable to working with (or using the support of) the CCP.

Chiang’s coup had ousted Wang Jingwei from leadership of the Guomindang following Sun Yat Sen’s death, and for that reason the leftwing which was coalescing around his leadership opposed the coup in the phraseology of bourgeois democracy. As we have seen without the CCP’s opposition to this coup this wing was impotent.

We have also seen how Chiang Kai-shek did not feel confident enough to embark on the Northern Expedition without the material and political support of the CCP and Soviet Union. Therefore the Comintern and CCP should have publicly backed the progressive Northern Expedition as an independent party. Had Chiang Kai-shek then reneged on this pledge to struggle against Warlordism and imperialism, lacking the required acquiescence of the Communists, he would have been exposed as a faker seeking only to use the communist movement.

At this point an open struggle would have ensued between Chiang and the CCP, the latter calling for a revolutionary war against imperialism and Warlordism and able to count on the newly awakened mass support of the working class in Shanghai and Guangzhuo, as well as the resources of the Soviet Union. In order to win over the peasantry and urban petty bourgeoisie to their banner, the CCP could have proposed a bloc or united front with the left Guomindang, exploiting the open split in that party, in order to overthrow Chiang’s dictatorship and initiate a struggle against imperialism. The terms of this united front would have to be agrarian reform to give land to the peasants. It is true the left Guomindang would eventually have betrayed such a united front, just as the left Social Revolutionaries did, but only after the CCP had publicly come out in favour of land reform and against the openly pro-imperialist Chiang Kai-shek.

The Northern Expedition drove up through China from the nationalist base in the far South along two main fronts, the first (the ‘Western Route Northern Expeditionary Forces’) headed toward Wuhan (a conglomeration of three cities - Hankou, Wuchang and Hanyang) on the Yangzee River in Hubei Province, Eastern Central China), the other, led by Chiang Kai-shek (the ‘Central Route Northern Expeditionary Forces’), headed toward Nanchang in Jiangxi Province, which is slightly to the South East of Wuhan. Both offensives achieved relatively rapid success, but the former, more closely associated with the Guomindang left wing and the mass movement, was stunningly successful in defeating the Warlords, taking the key city of Wuhan, 1,000km from Guangzhou, three months after setting out, whereas the latter, associated with Chiang Kai-shek, was less so, taking an additional month to reach the nearer  city of Nanchang and sacrificing more lives on the way.

The explanation for this lies in the class contradictions of Chinese society. The armies of the Northern Expedition enjoyed the active support of the masses of China, who rose up in anticipation of the coming armies, which they saw as liberators from landlord oppression. They sabotaged the defence of the militarists in countless ways – mini-uprisings of unorganised peasants took strategic villages on behalf of the armies, peasants acted as a sort of vast informal network of spies for the expedition, and workers struck in key industries in Wuhan and other cities. To this must be added the demoralisation in the ranks of the Warlord armies, swathes of whom must have had no desire to defend a rotten regime.

In other words the peasantry and new sections of the working class were following the example of the Guangzhou and Shanghai workers and taking the revolution into their own hands. Peasants were organising their own land reform and organising on a mass scale independently of the Guomindang (not only did new trade unions flourish in Hubei, but according to Isaacs 2m joined new peasant associations in neighbouring Hunan province). All of this confirms the Marxist thesis that the peasantry can play a decisive role in the revolution, and will always look to whichever urban class offers them a way out, which in this case was the revolutionary workers.

Furthermore, although clearly the workers and peasants here were inspired by the Northern Expedition and so looking to the Guomindang as the leadership of that movement, ignorant of its recent role in crushing the movement in Guangzhou, they were at the same time organising independently of the Guomindang and along class lines, in direct contradiction with that bourgeois party’s class basis and political line for the revolution. This contradiction between the masses and the Guomindang would shortly lead to further coups from both the right and left Guomindang against the revolution.

It was clearly the class content of the revolutionary overturn in Guangzhou, organised as it was by the CCP’s trade unions, that directly inspired these peasants and workers further north. A class basis existed then for the CCP to expand its influence in this new opening up of the struggle, and indeed it was one seized by the party’s rank and file,

“[the CCP] organised workers and peasants into all types of commando units to handle reconnaissance, spying and scouting. These units were also responsible for sabotage of communications behind enemy lines (railroads, electrical lines, ships, etc.), and for collection of abandoned weapons when the enemy retreated. Among the official positions in the National Revolutionary Army, there were dozens of CCP members acting as company commanders, battalion commanders, and regimental commanders...All of these quick and surprising victories were the direct result of the active aid rendered by the worker and peasant masses which had been mobilised by members of the CCP.” (Peng Shuzhi, op cit.)

The objective class character of the revolution was asserting itself in spite of its leadership. We can see very clearly the basis for the CCP to take over leadership of the revolution had it set itself this task. Its name, its founding objectives, its thousands of rank and file members, directly embroiled in the struggle alongside the masses, often leading them in military roles, its link to the victorious Russian Revolution and the access to arms (in addition to those already under its control through commanding Northern Expedition troops) that this enabled, its leading role in the unions all speak of the enormously favourable conditions for a CCP led revolution against the Guomindang provided it openly supported land reform and the social revolution.

It was precisely fear of the revolutionary independence of the masses and the role of the CCP that lay behind Chiang Kai-shek’s slower and bloodier conquest of Nanchang. Naturally there was less CCP influence in his ranks following his suppression of the CCP in Guangzhou. It was this continued policy of the suppression of the CCP and the mass movement which weakened his campaign. “Chiang had restricted the activities of the propagandists and had along the line of march already adopted repressive measures against the mass movement. This enabled Sun Chuanfang, militarist overlord of the five eastern provinces, to put up stiffer resistance” (Isaacs, op cit.).

The Character of the ‘Left’ Guomindang

The physical divergence of the two tendencies in the Guomindang, the left (or rather the vacillating) taking Wuhan and the right (or decisive) taking Nanchang, cemented the open split between them. We already know the character of the right-wing led by Chiang Kai-shek, thanks to his coup against the CCP in Guangzhou. This tendency was the clear Bonapartist one, that is to say it represented the tendency to raise the repressive state power above society in order to crush the revolution. But what was the character of this new ‘left’ Guomindang government in Wuhan led by Wang Jingwei?

It was undoubtedly a weak bourgeois regime, whose fear of the movement of the masses led it to pose as its friend rather than to crush it. It had not yet abandoned the petty bourgeois utopian Sun Yat Senist ideology of national harmony across the classes. But the leaders of this national harmony of course had to be the ‘natural’ leaders of the nation, that is the men of property, for to put the workers movement in the lead in their stead would mean to expropriate this property, to put it in the hands of the workers, and that already means an end to intra-class harmony. Hence the opposition from these leaders, and the Comintern in their wake, toward any independence of the workers, to strikes and to land reform, despite the fact that the strikes of the workers against the capitalists, and the land seizures by the peasants, were precisely what had brought the ‘left’ Guomindang to power in Wuhan.

Indeed a condition for work in the Guomindang laid down by the Comintern was that the CCP must only support land reform for land pertaining to militarist landlords. But if a party such as the Guomindang has a policy of not expropriating the land of any landlords that support it, then naturally all landlords will proclaim that they support the Guomindang as soon as it proves stronger than the Warlord regime. In this way an entire class and property system evaded the CCP.

A Marxist leadership bases itself on a materialist analysis of the fundamental antagonisms between the classes in order to understand which way the class struggle will develop. It would understand that the enormous proliferation of revolutionary, political strikes and land seizures in carrying out the revolution on the one hand, and the existence of a recent military coup against these tendencies on the other, would signify an extreme intensification of class struggle such that a harmonious class compromise is ruled out.

In these conditions it was an impossibility for the Guomindang to maintain a passive policy of class collaboration and democracy for any length of time. Therefore a Marxist party would gear all its efforts toward preparing itself and the masses for an open struggle against the bourgeois party. At every step the CCP should have “worked inside the Guomindang and patiently drawn the workers and peasants over to their side...by supporting every forward step of the Guomindang, by relentlessly unmasking every vacillation, every step backward, and by creating a real revolutionary foundation for a bloc with the Guomindang in the form of workers’, peasants’, and soldiers’ soviets” (Trotsky, op cit.). The CCP should have exploited the Guomindang’s attacks on the mass movement by acting as the latter’s chief defender.

But as we have explained, the Comintern had ceased to have a Marxist leadership which approached everything from the standpoint of the class struggle, and instead imagined it could order the class struggle out of existence in order to secure its coveted alliance with the Guomindang. Because the party was tied to the Guomindang above all else, it could not independently stand for land reform etc., and so could not win the masses who strove for land reform to its banner, fatally weakening itself and the revolution come the time when even the ‘left’ Guomindang would openly attack the revolution.

Voroshilov, a Comintern advisor in China, complained that “the peasant revolution might have interfered with the Northern Expedition of the generals”, failing to notice that it was precisely the peasant revolution which secured the revolution for the generals. As Trotsky correctly predicted, these ‘left’ Guomindang generals and political leaders, whose policy was to use the mass movement to wring concessions from and make a deal with imperialism, would have to turn sharply to the right and attack that mass movement once it had served its purpose of bringing them to power, just as Chiang had. This would be necessary in order to better negotiate access to foreign capital and weaponry rather than incur the embargo that the imperialists threatened.

Chiang Approaches Shanghai

It was Chiang Kai-shek that took the initiative in the struggle to consolidate power in the Guomindang following the split with Wang Jingwei by driving on with his ‘Central Route Northern Expeditionary Forces’ to Shanghai, which was slightly closer to his base of Nanchang than Wang Jingwei in Wuhan. Of course capturing Shanghai, which was not only a key strategic city in general, but also the epicentre of imperialist/compradore bourgeoisie relations, would practically cement Chiang Kai-shek’s dominance of the Guomindang.

Once again the objectively progressive character of the war against the Warlords was expressed in an unprecedented development of the labour movement in Shanghai as Chiang’s forces approached. Again, this shows both the support in the populace for the Guomindang (or at least support for what it was doing), but also the socially deeper support for the CCP. For it was the General Labour Union (GLU), founded and led by CCP comrades, which organised and coordinated the immense upturn in strike activity in the early months of 1927. According to Isaacs more than 350,000 heeded the GLU’s call for a general strike on 19^th February 1927 with the intention of weakening the existing regime (Shanghai was under the control of the same Warlord, Sun Chuanfang, as Nanchang). Yes, these workers (for the time being at least) supported Chiang Kai-shek’s leadership – but only under the instructions of the leadership of the leaders of their own class, the CCP, to which they were far closer.

As we shall shortly see, on this basis the working class could have taken this key city even before Chiang Kai-shek arrived and with far less violence, so all embracing was the popularity of the revolution and the CCP amongst the Shanghainese working class. Under a correct strategy and with military aid from the Comintern there is no doubt that the workers of Shanghai could have successfully opposed Chiang Kai-shek, exploiting the splits and resulting weaknesses in the Guomindang, leaving Chiang adrift in the Zhejiang countryside as an historical footnote.

Instead thanks to the erroneous policy of subservience to the Guomindang, more nonsensical than ever now that the party was split and without leadership, the CCP was obliged to ingest and reproduce all the confusion, weakness and vacillation of the leaderless Guomindang. There was no clear policy regarding Chiang Kai-shek’s role just when the comrades in Shanghai needed it the most. Whenever the CCP was in the proximity of Chiang, they denied the existence of the split in the party, rallying the working class around him. They were incapable of taking even tentative steps beyond the confines of his leadership. But in Wuhan they were emboldened by the established fact of Chiang’s betrayal and openly attacked him. But just like the ‘left’ Guomindang they were incapable of offering any programme to take the revolution forwards against Chiang Kai-shek, once again terrified of taking an independent course.

By now of course the CCP leaders had been beaten into a habit of simply following Comintern or Guomindang orders. The spirit of independence had been suffocated. And yet at the same time the gravity of the revolution and its class dynamics compelled them to do something with the labour movement, hence the confused character of this general strike in Shanghai which despite its powerful social force aimed at nothing more than welcoming a would-be military dictator,

“the strike was effective but its leadership had no goals of its own. The slogans announced by the Communists were confined to: “Support the Northern Expeditionary Army!” “Overthrow Sun Chuanfang!” “Hail Chiang Kai-shek!” The Central Committee of the Communist Party simply waited on events and orders from outside” (Isaacs, op cit.)

Once a general strike has been organised and is taking place, there is no going back. The strike movement must boldly go forwards from one conquest to another, with a clear strategy and set of demands so that all participants understand what they are fighting for, which will strengthen their resolve. But calling out hundreds of thousands of workers on no independent programme, simply to welcome someone else, is extremely dangerous. It is akin to ordering an army into the no man’s land between trenches, and leaving them there with nothing to do.

The inability for the workers of Shanghai to use their strike to conquer any positions for themselves gave the ruling class the confidence to quickly counter-attack. And the lack of any strategy comprehended by the workers meant that, faced with the counter-attack, those workers had no means with which to reorient themselves and fight back. Disarray ensued. Indeed there is evidence that Chiang Kai-shek colluded with the Warlord regime in Shanghai, deliberately delaying his arrival in the city so that the police could slaughter the stranded workers. He certainly had every incentive to do this since it had the dual benefit of weakening the communists and keeping his hands clean. The fact that General Li, who commanded the counter-attack, was later made the commander of the 8^th Nationalist Army under Chiang Kai-shek shows that Chiang was grateful for his actions whether or not he colluded in them.

Isaacs quotes the New York Herald Tribune in the midst of the general strike as it describes the brutality of the ruling class’ sudden counter-attack,

“After the heads of the victims were severed by swordsmen, they were displayed on top of poles or placed upon platters and carried through the streets...The executioners bearing broadswords and accompanied by a squad of soldiers, marched their victims to a prominent corner where the strike leaders were forced to bend over while their heads were cut off. Thousands fled in horror when the heads were stuck on sharp-pointed bamboo poles and were hoisted aloft and carried to the scene of the next execution.”

The tragedy is that with a correct leadership the millions of Shanghai could have been mobilised around the hundreds of thousands of striking workers and simply overwhelmed the executioners.

More than a month passed before Chiang Kai-shek entered the city, and in the meantime the workers once again took the initiative against the Warlord regime. The CCP led GLU called another general strike and on 21^st March up to 800,000 came out, utterly paralysing the city and regime. It would seem that, despite the absence of national and international leadership, the local working class and CCP comrades had learnt from the harrowing experience one month previously,

“This time there were carefully laid plans for an insurrection based upon a workers’ militia composed of 5,000 picked and trained men, broken up into squads of twenty and thirty. According to one account, their total initial supply of arms consisted of 150 Mauser pistols. That meant less than one to a squad. The attack on the police and Shandong soldiery was made in the beginning only with clubs, axes, and knives.”

And yet through sheer numbers and determination this proved sufficient,

“The fight for control of police stations and local military posts was won by the workers by nightfall in all sections except Chapei. Many soldiers and policemen tore off their uniforms and surrendered arms and ammunition. Weapons were taken everywhere and by evening the attacking forces were comparatively well supplied...Soldiers and police caught in flight were disarmed. Many of them joined the pickets in setting up a Provisional Workers’ Bureau of Public Safety and in taking over the municipal offices of the whole district.” (Ibid)

So much for Chiang Kai-shek the all powerful and ‘gallant commander of the Cantonese’ to whom all communists must bow. In the end, the working class took over this great city in a manner far more comprehensive than any simple military occupation could ever manage, showing that in war the class struggle must not be postponed till after a military victory but used to ensure military victory. The organised Shanghainese working class was now in possession of that most precious prize of the class struggle – the armed bodies of men that make up the state. They had no reason to surrender their arms to anyone since there can be no social force more formidable than the armed, united and fully conscious working class.