the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Apr 3, 2025
The following article was translated from an article appearing in Lutte de Classe #247, April 2025, the political journal of Lutte Ouvrière, the French Trotskyist organization. A historical article, it presents us with a fuller understanding of China today.
The terrible defeat of the Chinese armies against the English gunboats during the Second Opium War in 1858 confirmed Marx’s predictions: “That isolation having come to a violent end by the medium of England, dissolution must follow as surely as that of any mummy carefully preserved in a hermetically sealed coffin, whenever it is brought into contact with the open air.” Marx was aware that England, the country where he lived, was going to be, thanks to its new industrial power, its colonies, and its aggressiveness, at the head of economic and social upheavals of such magnitude that they were going to change the future of the planet and drag along, willingly or by force, the most backward peoples including those of China.
Indeed, this immense country, with its social and political stability spanning millennia, was shaken down to its oldest and sturdiest foundations: its emperor and his armada of scholarly bureaucrats, who constituted an immense centralized and educated administration and allowed direct political control over the peasant population, themselves tied to the land by intensive subsistence agriculture. It was these peasants who maintained the empire and its mandarins.
The Opium Wars left the imperial power humiliated and Chinese society with its belly ripped open. China would then experience nearly 100 years of dismemberment by the imperialists, social disintegration, revolts and revolutions: the Taiping, the Boxers, the workers’ revolution of 1927, culminating after 1945 in Mao’s revolution.
Analyzing the events and failures of the empire, intellectuals sought a different future for China. But what force was powerful enough to sweep away thousands of years of clan organization and ritualized subjugation of millions of peasants?
The humiliated empire lost all credibility. To pay for the colossal war reparations, it constantly increased taxes without being able to ensure the maintenance of river dikes or provide famine relief, both of which were essential for poor peasants to survive. Thus, until the end of the 19th century, there were everywhere explosions of peasant rage that died down in one place only to reignite elsewhere.
Influential families, including landowners and mandarins, nurtured by Confucian conservatism and a strong sense of superiority, saw their privileges undermined by the weakening of central power. In this China where the pillars of the old order were crumbling, their children no longer had a future. These young people were quickly attracted to Westerners, sought inspiration from them, and even went abroad. It was in the minds of these men, who were wondering about China’s future, that new ideas were born.
It was in Japan, among Chinese students, that a movement emerged around Sun Yat‑Sen and his three principles: nationalism, democracy, and the well‑being of the people, which, while being ideas found in the West, were imbued with Chinese traditionalism.
The empire finally fell. It was on October 10, 1911, that some prominent figures made the most decisive move! In Wuchang, they refused to allow the government to seize funds intended for the railway and obtained the support of the generals and peasants. The revolution spread to the South. Men cut their braids—a symbol of submission to the Manchus—and burned relics of ancestor worship. It was the end of the thousand‑year‑old empire, which had collapsed as if shaken by the unstoppable shocks of a powerful earthquake. It was replaced by a short‑lived republic and chaos.
A dark age of militarism and civil war—that was all the bourgeoisie, which had never had an independent existence and was too closely tied to the West, had to offer society.
The vacuum created by the absence of central power and the resulting chaos, however, allowed the development of a savage capitalism governed by money, the traditional drug market, and the framework of the old family system of clans. The bourgeoisie even enjoyed a certain golden age when, during World War I, Western competition declined, giving it temporary access to consumer markets. The result was an anarchy worthy of the early ages of capitalism, multiplied by the giant scale of China. The coastal cities of the 1920s resembled gambling dens. The journalist Albert Londres, with a certain despair, described Shanghai in this way: “Thus was born Shanghai of a Chinese mother and an American‑English‑French‑German‑Dutch‑Italian‑Japanese‑Judeo‑Spanish father. [...] Piracy, gambling, cocktails—a million dollars—that’s the name of the Shanghai cocktail—opium, morphine, cocaine, heroin, find in Shanghai the city of their eternal Spring.”
This nascent capitalism was inevitably accompanied by the emergence of a completely new class, from the countryside, often sold by clan chiefs and sent like cattle to enter factories of the port cities with conditions akin to penal colonies; men, women, and children were forcibly mixed with those from other provinces, speaking other dialects. They often lived in old, abandoned boats or bamboo huts on the shore, working up to 20 hours a day and sometimes giving half their wages to their clan intermediaries. Westerners called them stinking but useful animals.
Exacerbated by inhuman living conditions, worse than in the countryside, disoriented because they were a thousand miles from their province, their village, and their clan, this population, despite the differences in dialect, was forced to get along together in the factories and the shantytowns. It instinctively became a combative milieu, freed from the thousand ties binding it to the village, and it became politicized. Spontaneously, the workers organized themselves in unions and listened to the students who turned to communism, themselves breaking with old China and all its clutter of the past. For them, everything had to be changed, nothing kept. With communist ideas, the revolt found its words, its ideas, a goal, and a social class for the fight.
The Chinese Communist Party was founded in 1920–1921. The workers’ upsurge had already begun two years earlier. The number of strikes rose from 25 in 1918 to 91 in 1922, and the number of strikers rose from 10,000 to 150,000. And in more than 50% of strikes, the workers won. A 1924 May Day leaflet in Shanghai summed up the workers’ mood: “The time is over when workers were nothing but fodder for the bosses. If they need a revolution in order to give way, they’ll get it!”
In just a few years, the working class made decades of progress in terms of labor struggle advances. It recognized unions as the basic form of organization (there were more than 500,000 union members in Canton‑Hong Kong in 1925), and the Chinese Communist Party as its party.
In 1925, following the British machine‑gunning of protesters in Shanghai, strikes broke out all along the coast. In Hong Kong, 100,000 strikers began a total boycott of British goods. Under the leadership of an elected strike committee, picket lines controlled the passage of people and goods. Only two steamers managed to dock instead of the usual 200.
The strike committee managed everything, from weapons to schools and hospitals. It became the “Chinese version of the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies.” And Trotsky specified in one of his letters: “‘Chinese version’ is understood not in the sense of some sort of decisive national peculiarity, but in the sense of the character of a stage of development of the soviet system: it was a soviet of deputies of the type that existed in the summer of 1905 in Ivanovo-Voznesensk,” that is, the first Soviet of the 1905 revolution.
The peasants, often incited by their associations, patrolled along the coasts and prevented British ships from landing surreptitiously. Then, when a warlord tried to regain power in Canton, they cut his supply lines, forcing him to retreat. In their struggle, the peasants, exacerbated by poverty, immediately recognized their allies.
The Hong Kong strike opened the revolution of 1925–1927, which from the outset manifested as a struggle of the exploited in both cities and the countryside. For the radicalism of the workers was matched by the radicalism of the peasants. The latter took land from the landlords, the foot bindings of girls were torn off, and the relics of the Confucian cult were paraded through the streets. But putting an end once and for all to the oppression of the countryside meant cleaning out “Augean stables” even dirtier than those Lenin spoke of for Russia. The Chinese working class could guide the peasantry along this path.
Despite its immense promises, the revolution was to be crushed through the fault of the Comintern (the Communist International).
The young, expanding proletariat had full confidence in the Communist Party and followed it when it recommended that militant workers join the Kuomintang, then the rising nationalist force. But this still young C.P. was under the influence of the Communist International. It was 1927 and the Bolshevik Party in power in the USSR was in the midst of a factional struggle of those, including the Trotskyists, who opted to strengthen the power of the working class, against the rising Stalinist bureaucracy, which dreamed of social stability and recognition by the bourgeoisie. No doubt convinced that they would make short work of the Kuomintang nationalists, the Russian bureaucrats naively provided it with weapons and military cadres, and, as a bonus, the support of the Chinese C.P. This was a profound underestimate of the imperialists’ capacity for harm.
Since the beginning of the revolutionary upsurge, Trotsky had been advocating for the C.P. to leave the Kuomintang. But the Comintern forced it to stay there, to submit completely, to serve as “coolies,” as its representative called them. When the leader of the Kuomintang, Chiang Kai‑shek, disarmed the Canton‑Hong Kong Soviet, the Comintern did not react. Then, when he went all the way to Shanghai, massacring the workers who had risen up in his path, the Comintern asked the Communists “to hide, to bury all the weapons in the possession of the workers, in order to avoid a military confrontation between Chiang Kai‑shek and the workers.” As Harold Isaacs puts it, “these directives amounted to asking the Communists in Shanghai to meekly lay their heads on the executioners’ block.”
When in April Chiang Kai‑shek arrived in Shanghai, then in the hands of the insurgent workers, he disarmed them and then had them massacred. This suppression and the hunt for communists in the following months left several hundred thousand dead. In the eyes of the imperialists, this was the brutal and demonstrative act that allowed Chiang Kai‑shek to be dubbed their right‑hand man. The Comintern, for its part, continued its relations with Chiang Kai‑shek as if nothing had happened, choosing to conceal this crushing of the workers in the Bolshevik Party, in the USSR, and throughout the International.
Chen Duxiu, founder and leader of the Communist Party, who was best positioned to draw lessons from this experience, concluded: “Sincerely applying the opportunist policy of the Third International, I unconsciously became the tool of Stalin’s narrow faction; I was able to save neither the party nor the revolution. For all this, I, as well as other comrades, must be held responsible.”
For a long period the failure of the 1927 revolution eliminated the proletarian path, the one that would have made it possible to fundamentally overthrow the old world made up of ancestral beliefs and blind submission to the powerful, a world in which the bulk of the peasantry remained frozen in ignorance and poverty.
After all, even the French bourgeoisie in 1789, willingly or unwillingly, had allowed the peasant population to attack the vestiges of order, not only aristocratic but also religious. Only the working class could help the peasantry make that choice. In 1917, the Bolsheviks had been able to multiply their numbers to go into the countryside to help the most crushed muzhiks, to organize themselves into soviets of poor peasants. Only a working class conscious of its tasks could be capable of that. And it was this path, which was first and foremost that of the eradication of the old world, to build a new world, that was blocked; a path that would have allowed an escape from underdevelopment, something that even Mao’s revolution was not going to succeed in doing, even if this is partially the case today for the urban population.
Despite Trotsky’s 1928 advice, given at a time when he had been removed from power, not to leave the cities nor abandon the working class, fractions of the C.P., including Mao’s, accepted the new situation, fled to the countryside, and turned to the peasantry. This was also, by force of circumstances, a return to family traditions and provincial habits that resonated with many militants who were adrift.
The so‑called “Red Army” consisted of only a few hundred soldiers with few rifles, dispossessed peasants, deserters, and local bandits; they had to live off the peasants and be tolerated by them. All in all, for the villagers, these “Reds,” who neither brutalized nor plundered too much, were still better than the warlords or the “dog‑legs,” the Kuomintang’s proxies.
Legend has it that during this period, a peasant revolutionary movement was growing. In reality, the isolated communists adapted to the peasantry to survive. For the smallest commodities, such as fuel, matches, cloth, and salt, they depended on merchants, who were also the wealthiest peasants, moneylenders, and employers. In fact, they relied on the existing social organization, its hierarchy, and its traditions. Mao may have called Jiangxi, where he was stranded, “Soviet China,” but he himself recognized that rich peasants had become the majority in the important positions of the party and the administration he had established. And when Chiang Kai‑shek invaded the region in 1934, the experiment turned into a disaster, as the population did not support the C.P. at all.
The “Long March” designates a year‑long episode of an armed band in flight, one of many such bands at the time. In fact, the most significant long march of the time was Mao’s march to power at the head of the Communist Party. He managed to attract other bands, sometimes calling themselves communists, sometimes those of a defeated warlord, sometimes remnants of the Kuomintang armies. He eliminated his opponents among the Communist cadres by launching campaigns of accusations against them, and many disappeared.... The others yielded to him. When he settled in the North, in the caves of Yan’an, in 1935, he had become the undisputed leader. The party was certainly reduced to almost nothing, but Mao had forged a rigorously selected apparatus, on which he had imposed discipline and centralization.
Only the literate mastered the complex Chinese language. The majority of the peasant population spoke different languages depending on the province. The feeling of belonging to the same nation was not obvious. Moreover, the C.P., at the time when it was active in the cities, fought under the slogan: “Workers have no homeland, not even provinces.”
Japan’s military intervention changed the situation. Seeking to become the great Asian power, it prepared for the future world war by fanaticizing its troops to the extreme, by indoctrinating and repressing the population. It was Japan’s armies that would descend on South China in 1937 after invading Manchuria in 1931. And it was the exactions of these troops, imbued with their superiority, that would gradually create a sense of being Chinese in the context of this horror, atrocities such as the “Rape of Nanking,” its 200,000 deaths, the systematic rape of women, and the policy of the Three Alls: “Kill all, burn all, loot all” in Northern China.
In August 1945, after the American atomic bombs were dropped on it, Japan capitulated. Then negotiations began. For the great powers that decided the fate of the world, China was to fall to the imperialist camp. The United States had its man, Chiang Kai‑shek, at the head of the Kuomintang, which had proven itself. Stalin, respecting the Yalta agreements to the letter, agreed. Mao negotiated with Chiang Kai‑shek for 41 days to obtain a government of national unity, but the very next day, Chiang Kai‑shek sent his troops to exterminate the “Reds.” Against starving and poorly armed soldiers, and with three to four million soldiers and all the logistical power of America, he was sure of himself.
During the atrocious Japanese occupation, the peasants’ feelings of hatred had accumulated. After the departure of the Japanese troops, they attacked those who had profited from the occupation: the same people who had always exploited them, large landowners, usurers.... To the old exploitation and Japanese exactions, they had added taxes, duties, requisitions, and forced labor. The peasants had touched bottom in their distress. The C.P. cadres organized “bitterness sessions” so that the peasants could tell their stories.... But they were quickly overwhelmed; anger exploded, the lords who had treated the peasants like cattle were themselves harnessed to the plows, and sometimes it went further. The insurrection had begun.
It was an uprising that the C.P. had not wanted and which posed a problem for it because, since 1927, not once had it defended a program aimed at the poor peasants. Their program was limited to a 25% reduction in leases and interest rates, which was moderate enough to be viewed favorably by the wealthy peasantry, its true social base. To swing to the side of the poor peasants was to lose that support as well as that of the urban bourgeoisie who held interests in the land. But to face Chiang Kai‑shek’s troops alone was certain death.
Between these two policies, the Communist Party hesitated for almost a year. “Finally, during the summer of 1946, letters brought the commissars the following order: divide up the land. The die was cast. The C.P. had chosen. It had crossed the Rubicon.”
The peasant movement would tip the balance of power in favor of the C.P. For it was impossible for the nationalists to confront hundreds of millions of peasants ready to die for the land.
Things would move very quickly from there. Even though Chiang Kai‑shek continued the civil war, the ground was shifting beneath his feet. His armies were surrendering to the Communists, and the high command, riddled with corruption, appeared more stupid, incompetent, and spineless than ever. In the cities, the petty bourgeoisie was so disgusting that they were just waiting for the Communists.
More than Communist military victories, there was in fact a complete collapse of Chiang Kai‑shek’s regime. It was the immense peasant movement that achieved this, clearing the path to power for the C.P. The entry of Chinese armies into the major cities was only a matter of time.
The ground had been loosened: recommendations were made to the population to remain calm and for workers to continue working and to protect property, including foreign property. Local C.P. cadres had revived their networks (the clans are so large...) and organized banquets for the notables who, provided they declared themselves patriots, had nothing to worry about. Of course, the richest bourgeois had already sheltered their fortunes, leaving a family member behind to keep an eye on their property, while they waited to see how things turned out.
Meanwhile, the Kuomintang scoundrels were emptying their strongholds, and at night, Chiang Kai‑shek forced lines of coolies to carry, at gunpoint, the gold bars he stole from the Bank of China.
In the morning, the peasant troops, duly chaperoned by the C.P. cadres, entered the town.
After a century of horrors and massacres for the poorest, and of drug‑induced decline for the others, China had just experienced a revolution, led by a petty‑bourgeois army, duly trained over two decades of guerrilla warfare. It succeeded in liquidating the most glaring feudal vestiges of the old society, in putting an end to armed bands led by one warlord or another who sporadically crossed the whole of China, from north to south and from south to north, and finally in unifying this country that had been torn apart for a century!
China was equipping itself with a complex state apparatus, including Mao’s old comrades from the early days, young intellectuals cut adrift from the industrial and commercial bourgeoisie, and young rural people who came to the cities first to escape poverty, perhaps to work and above all to seize the opportunity to serve the party. An apparatus that was constantly indoctrinated and often purged.
At the end of World War II, imperialist leaders, particularly the Americans, violently opposed the Chinese revolution but failed to defeat it; so, they inflicted on it the murderous Korean War of 1950–1953 and its nearly three million deaths. Once again, Mao’s China resisted, even forcing the Americans to accept the status quo. But imperialism, ever relentless, threatened its coasts, starting from Taiwan, and finally imposed a blockade, cutting it off from the world market.
China then found itself forced to live in almost complete autarky. Mao, relying on the state apparatus he had established, attempted to cope. But at what cost? He had to strengthen his state at the cost of over‑exploiting the working class and keeping the peasantry in poverty, a policy continued by his successors. China maintained its independence by crushing the poorest. But when the country opened up in 1978, it nevertheless became clear that China had managed, despite everything, to partially escape the rut of backwardness, at least more so than its neighbor India.
Having become a subject of imperialism, China is considered a mere workshop for the most successful companies. Hoarding its dollars in American banks has made China completely dependent on the global capitalist economy.
Already in 1932, Trotsky had anticipated the consequences of a revolution not led by the proletariat; he wrote to his Chinese comrades who had informed him of their movement’s rebirth after the terrible repression of 1927: “But the peasantry, even when armed, is incapable of directing an independent policy.... Commonly occupying as it does an intermediate, indeterminate and vacillating position, the peasantry, in decisive moments, can follow either the proletariat or the bourgeoisie. Its road to the proletariat the peasantry does not find so easily and only after a series of mistakes and defeats. The bridge between the peasantry and the bourgeoisie is composed by the urban petty bourgeoisie, chiefly by the intellectuals, who commonly come forward under the banner of Socialism and even Communism.”
Twice already in the 20th century, imperialism has drawn humanity into global conflict in order to maintain its dominance over the peoples of the entire planet and the balance of power with its competitors.
In our time, the big bourgeoisie, which has become imperialist, dominates the entire planet, controlling all of humanity’s wealth, accumulated over nearly three centuries, and systematically keeping people backward. Today, no economic or social particularism has a future outside of bourgeois domination. Even countries as large as China are, more than ever, dependent.
Social evolution is moving toward a unification of the planet. But this globalization clashes in many ways with the private property of the big bourgeoisie, which, supported by powerful states, manages fortunes larger than the budgets of many countries.
The only class capable of forcing the bourgeoisie to cough up its wealth and of managing the economy on a global scale is the proletariat. As Trotsky said in the letter to Chinese comrades quoted above: “The worker strives to solve problems on a national scale [the collectivity] and in accordance with a plan; the peasant, on the other hand, approaches all problems on a local scale....” Today, the rapacity of the bourgeoisie is leading society into an impasse. To get out of it, only the proletariat, by overthrowing the power of the bourgeoisie, can offer a perspective to humanity.