Chinese Marxism
Chinese Marxism ADRIAN CHAN
To Andrea Continuum The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London, SEl 7NX 370 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10017-6503 First published 2003 Copyright Adrian Chan 2003 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 0-8264-5033-4 (hb) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Chan, Adrian, 1936- Chinese Marxism/ Adrian Chan. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8264-5033-4 1. Communism-China. 2. Socialism-China. 3. Mao Zedong, 1893-1976- Philosophy. I. Title. HX416.5.C4 2002 335.43'45-dc21 2002031094 Typeset by YHT Ltd, London Printed and bound in Great Britain by Selwood Printing Ltd., Burgess Hill, West Sussex
Acknowledgements Whether they agree with their conclusions or not, all scholars owe their predecessors immense debts. So I like to acknowledge my debts to Benjamin I. Schwartz, Stuart R. Schram, Maurice Meisner, Arif Dirlik, Michael Luk and Paul Evans, but most of all to my many students who challenged the explanation that iconoclasts such as Chen Duxui and his comrades had meekly followed the agents of the Communist International. It was to satisfy their questions as well as my own curiosity that gave rise to this book. I would like to thank all those at Continuum, especially my copy-editor Peter Harrison, who greatly improved the manuscript. But any fault, mistake or infelicitous expression that remains is my responsibility.
Introduction This book is an investigation of the development of the idea of Marxism in China, not a study of either the politics of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) or the People's Republic of China (PRC). While there are many works on the latter topics, there has as yet been no systematic analysis of the development and nature. of the idea of Marxism in China. I hope that this book will stimulate further investigations. When the Marxian message first arrived in China, the country's economy was predominantly agrarian, so the first concern of this study is to examine the writings of Marx to see whether his message is relevant to societies that have not yet industrialized. This has been a contentious issue among scholars and it is dealt with!n Chapter 1. The other issues to be examined are corollaries of this one. First, how were the Marxian message and the socioeconomic conditions in China at the time of the arrival of Marxism perceived by those who eventually embraced that message, that is, the founders of the CCP? This is discussed in Chapters 2 and 3. I then examine how the founding and later leaders of the CCP adapted and developed that Marxian message into a guide for revolutionary action in order to solve China's perceived economic, political and social problems and to achieve the goal of bringing about a Marxian socialist society. This examination follows a chronological order in its analysis of the development of Marxism in China up to the leadership of Jiang Zemin. However, more attention is given to the development of the theories and practice of Marxism as a revolutionary praxis during the leadership of Mao Zedong. Hitherto, scholars of Chinese communism, Marxism and the Chinese communist movement have generally agreed that the Marxian message is inappropriate to societies that are basically agrarian and pre-industrialized, as China was when Marxism arrived there. It seems necessary, therefore, to commence a study of Chinese Marxism with a brief study of Marx. An examination of the writings of Marx anci Engels will help us understand their views on the role of the peasantry in the socialist revolution they hoped to bring about, and the prospects for revolution in pre-industrialized societies. Contrary to accepted scholarly ideas, this book aims to show that Marx was always concerned with the liberation of societies in the preindustrialized stages. Furthermore, it seeks to establish that Marx had always insisted that a society may commence its socialist liberation no matter what its degree of development at the time, provided that it adopts the
2 Chinese Marxism appropriate processes for its liberation. Thus I argue here that the Marxian message does not require a society to be fully industrialized or fully capitalist before it can set out on the road to Marxian socialism, either in Europe at the time of Marx or in what is now called the Third W odd. What Marx required was the realization by the exploited people that they were being exploited, followed by a decision to struggle against their exploiters and to exert their rights to be liberated. This, to Marx, is the beginning of class, and class struggle. Indeed, I shall show that throughout his career, Marx had insisted that the peasantry must be part of a socialist revolution, even in the France and Germany of his time. To Marx, an important reason for the failures of the French and Germans in their socialist liberation struggles was their failure to involve their peasants. The founders of the Chinese Marxist movement, and their followers, embraced this Marxian admonition and incorporated it into their revolutionary strategies so as to avoid the mistakes of their European predecessors, such as the Parisian Communards. It follows that communists in societies that are predominantly agricultural and not fully industrialized can claim the imprimatur of Marx to embark on a Marxian socialist revolution. Marx advised them to form alliances with groups from other classes who wanted changes, 'irrespective of the degree of economic development at the time' (Marx and Engels in the dosing semences of The Communist Manifesto). This message was fully understood by the Chinese from their own reading of Marx, and before they met agents from the Communist International, the Comintern. Indeed, those who eventually went on to found the CCP had publicly announced, in their writings prior to the October Revolution, their adoption of Marxism as the means whereby they hoped to solve China's perceived economic, political and social problems. The founders of Chinese communism had long been concerned with the direction and problems of the economic, social and political developments in China and had investigated those conditions through social surveys. In the published reports of their surveys, as I shall show, they argued that China was on the verge of a social revolution. It was from their reading of Marn that these Chinese proto-communists learned of the need to involve both the proletariat foncier (rural proletariat) and the urban proletariat if their socialist revolution were to succeed. It has hitherto been accepted that Marxism, even in its own terms, was inappropriate to China at the time of the founding of the CCP. Scholars have generally insisted that those Chinese who became communists did so with inadequate understanding of Marxism. If those Chinese had really understood Marx, so received scholarship claims, they would have learned that Marx had nothing to say to a society such as China was in 1920, the year in which formal communist groups were established. The accepted idea is that the founders of the CCP were persuaded by Comintern agents to become communists at an emotionally vulnerable juncture occasioned by the
Introduction 3 decision of the victors at the Versailles Peace Conference to transfer to Japan the German concession in China's Shandong Province. This led to an outburst of nationalist fervour in 1919 known as the May Fourth Incident. At that time, the new Soviet Russia issued what has come to be known as the Karankhan Declaration, a vaguely worded document which gave the impression that Soviet Russia would return to China the territories which the tsarist regime had taken away. This version of Marxism in China first surfaced in a study by B. I. Schwartz, Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao (Schwartz, 195111967). This product of the Cold War argued that the Marxist movement in China was really a creation of the Comintern and that the Chinese, in their innocence and at a vulnerable moment, were seduced. It also claimed that the message of Marx was not relevant to China at that time because of the country's lack of industrialization. To demonstrate the point that the Chinese did not really understand Marx, Schwartz insisted that the founding leader of the CCP, Chen Duxiu, held Manchester Liberal views as late as December 1919 but declared himself a communist a mere six months later. Schwartz used this as evidence that there was no real intellectual conversion to Marxism. Not only has this Cold War version - that the Chinese communists were but creatures of the Soviet Union - not been challenged, but it remains the consensus of received scholarship. Since 1951, generations of Sinologists have accepted that version of how Marxism and Communism began in China. This study challenges this conclusion and will argue that Schwartz and his acolytes in the succeeding decades have attributed to the Chinese communists, especially Chen, ideas they did not state and have distorted what they actually wrote. This is a serious charge in the annals of scholarship. While the 1951 study of Schwartz may be excused as a result of the Cold War, there are no such excuses for more recent works completed during the 1990s. They will be discussed in appropriate chapters here. In this study, the major points of departure from received ideas are, first, that to Marx societies that have not yet fully industrialized can embark on a socialist revolution, but the dispossessed peasantry must be involved, even in countries in the Western Europe of Marx's own time; and second, that the early leaders of the CCP were fully aware that China was less developed than Russia, so the revolution in China should not blindly copy the Russian way. To the Chinese, the success of the Russian Revolution confirmed the correctness of their own reading of Marx: that a country not in an advanced state of industrialization can embark on, and succeed in, a Marxian socialist revolution. From the beginning, the Chinese Marxists tried to keep their revolutionary praxis distinct from that of the Soviet Union. Indeed, they saw their own actions as being more in accord with their readings of Marx, at least until Deng Xiaoping became leader, when the CCP decided to stop seeking answers in the writings of Marx.
4 Chinese Marxism To explore fully the vicissitudes of Marxism in China over the past eighty years would require many volumes, so this study will be selective and the contributions of some party leaders and even party theoreticians will be omitted. The criterion for selecting a particular thinker's ideas for inclusion is the impact and durability of his ideas on the development of Marxism in China, and not the length of time he held political power. So, on the basis of this criterion, the ideas of Qu Qiubai are discussed extensively, even though he was party leader for just one year. One of his enduring contributions was his insistence that Chinese Marxist praxis must be independent, not just a copy of the Russian one. However, his most enduring contribution was to make a cultural agenda an integral part of the socialist revolution. His influence endured long after his execution by anti-communist forces in 1935. His contribution to the Chinese Marxist theory of culture was articulated and published in 1932 after he had lost the party leadership, and his ideas had to wait for ten years before they became the official party line when Mao adopted and expanded on them in his 'Talks at the Yanan Forum on Literature and Art' in 1942. Qu also contributed much to the use of oral literature in the cause of the revolution. He used the traditional storytellers' method to spread the Marxian message in 'the language of the factory and the fields' to the illiterate urban and rural proletariat. By contrast, I omit any study of Wang Ming, even though he was a powerful figure for a much longer time than Qu. The leadership of Wang Ming would have to be included in any study of the history of the Chinese communist movement, but compared to Qu, his influence on the nature of Marxism in China was relatively slight and did not endure. He is remembered more for his imroduction of Stalin's practice of disposing of political rivals and opponents. The major contributor to the process, a revolutionary praxis appropriate to China, and distinct from that of the Soviet Union, was Mao Zedong. This study will show how Mao purposefully posited major differences between him and the Russians Lenin and Stalin, claiming to be more in accord with Marx. One aspect of Marx that the Chinese Marxists embraced and that distinguishes their practice from that of the Russians and most other Marxist revolutionaries is the Marxian idea of permanent revolution. It was first expressed during the leadership of Chen in the early 1920s, and, through Qu and Mao, was extended to become the guiding concept behind the Cultural Revolution. The influence of Qu was most recognizable in some of the theoretical reasoning behind this long campaign. Of the contributors to Marxism in China, the ideas of Mao deserve the most attention. The discussion on Mao will be in two parts. The first will be mainly theoretical, especially concerning the Yanan period in the 1940s, and will concentrate on the differences between his ideas and those of Lenin and Stalin. This part will also discuss how Mao developed Qu's ideas on the role
Introduction 5 of culture in a socialist revolution into the party line in his 'Talks on Literature and the Arts'. Qu, of course, developed his ideas from both Marx and Chen, his predecessor. Those ideas remained the party line until the end of Mao's leadership. The second part will take the form of two case studies: the campaigns known respectively as the Great Leap Forward and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. While both campaigns failed, in that they did not fulfil the goals stated at their outset, I shall argue that they failed mainly because Mao could not maintain enough control of the CCP to get it to support his policies. Not only was he thwarted by recalcitrant comrades such as Zhou Enlai, but he was seriously stymied by the weather! Moreover, being Marxian, Mao preferred not to plan every detail before he launched into those movements. This was a practical shortcoming of Mao's thought, especially the theories of knowledge and action which he developed from his reading of Marx. I believe that an aversion to detailed planning may in fact be a fundamental failing of Marxism as a methodology of social revolution. Although the Chinese Marxists were often accused of being poor planners, we shall see that Marxists, such as Mao, are ideologically precluded from accepting a method of action that requires detailed planning prior to the launch of the action. That conclusion is very much at variance with the scholarly consensus. In the period of post-mao reform, the CCP was anxious to remain Marxist, at least initially, but for reasons very different from those in Mao's days. The post-mao leaders eventually had to redefine socialism in such a way as to exclude Marxism, Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought as a matter of necessity, despite the fact that those ideas remained the official guiding principles of the CCP. The retention of these guiding principles by the post Mao CCP was prompted by the Chinese communists' concern for their own legitimacy, as well as a continued desire to be considered socialist. They retained the threefold guiding principles because these gave the CCP the legitimacy to remain the sole ruling party. But as its agenda and priorities for economic development 'deepened' - that is, developed further - the CCP could no longer sustain its legitimacy on Marxist grounds, or even on the basis of the threefold guiding principles. That is, the CCP's crisis of legitimacy deepened as its reform agenda progressed. Eventually, in its new slogan of 'socialism with Chinese characteristics', the CCP came to base its argument on the rationale that as the Marxist praxis requires situationspecific strategies, it was valid to place emphasis on the Chineseness of the slogan. To this end, the CCP re-enlisted a quintessentially Chinese political theory able to legitimate dubious practices and regimes: the theory known in English as Confucianism. In short, the thesis of this book is that throughout the history of Marxism in China down to the death of Mao, the Chinese accepted Marxism as a
6 Chinese Marxism means of solving their perceived economic, political and social problems. But in the post-mao period, Marxism was initially retained as a legitimizing ideology or device. However, it is not the purpose of this study to argue whether the Chinese Marxists were, or are, true Marxists, or even whether they are truer than others who have claimed to be Marxists. Indeed, it is just as hard to find a 'true Marxist' as a 'true Christian', even if it were possible to define what being such a person might entail. What I do claim is that the Chinese communists, up to the death of Mao, could justifiably claim that their theories and practice were premised on Marx, and that their critics are wrong in denying that claim. Finally, I need to say a few words on my sources. As this study hopes to present a challenge or alternative to the currently received ideas concerning Marxism in China, the analyses and conclusions I present here are based on Chinese sources published contemporaneously with the events they describe - that is, the Marxian messages which the CCP expounded to the ordinary people, rather than the official party communiques, which were often framed in such a way as to appease the CCP's Comintern comrades. While most of the sources are readily available in good research libraries, many of them seem to have been neglected or not carefully read by scholars. They include such well-known journals as Xin Qingnian (New Youth), Xiang Dao (Weekly Guide) and Zhongguo Qingnian (Chinese Youth), which in the early 1920s strongly advocated the involvement of the peasantry. I also used the collected and scattered writings of many CCP leaders, the memoirs of participants, and, finally, Chinese translations of the writings of Marx and other pioneering Marxists. My use of Chinese translations of Marx needs explanation. First, they have been neglected by scholars in China and elsewhere, and second, they provide us with a most useful window on Chinese Marxists' understanding of Marxism. It is quite well known that early members of the CCP had access to The Manifesto of the Communist Party, but it has not previously been reported in the scholarly literature that they used Section IV of The Manifesto to defend themselves against their contemporaries who claimed that China was economically too backward for a Marxian socialist revolution to succeed. Another unreported fact of even greater significance is their access to Marx's Civil War in France, which was available in translation before the first CCP congress in 1921. The importance of this essay by Marx to the development of Marxism in China is attested to by the fact that it was issued no fewer than three times, by different publishers and in different translations, during the first seventeen years of the CCP's existence. Not only has the relevance of this essay to the development of Chinese Marxism been overlooked by Western scholars, but, even in China, experts on Party history whom I have consulted were surprised when I presented them with the printed evidence from that time. To be sure, these three translations were not
Introduction 7 'exact'; they were edited down to about one-third the length of the original. However, this editing process caused the short chapter on the peasantry in the First Draft (Marx, 1871) to take on an increased significance, if only because in those abridged versions it occupied a relatively much larger proportion of the essay. In that chapter, Marx argued that the failure of the 1872 Paris Commune was due to its failure to involve the proletariat foncier, whose objective needs were the same as those of the urban proletariat but who suffered the 'delusive prejudice' of hoping to regain the land they had lost when agriculture became commercialized. That was a most timely message to the new Marxists in China. Their founding leader, Chen, was a known Francophile who had earlier translated Rousseau. Another important translation was of the letters of Marx and Engels to Ferdinand Lasalle on the use of art as an agent of the socialist revolution. They were translated and published in 1932 by Qu, who added a discussion on their relevance to the Chinese revolutionary theatre. Again, this translation is still unreported in the scholarly literature. In cases where the Chinese sources are available in English translations, the official or the most easily available version is cited, unless that version has significant changes in areas pertinent to the issues at hand. In such cases, I point out the differences and investigate their significance. In cases when there is no easily available English translation, or only an inadequate translation, I have translated the passages concerned myself. REFERENCE Schwartz, Benjamin I. (1951) Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Edition used is by Harper Torchbooks, New York, 1967.
CHAPTER 1 A Marxian message to pre-industrialized societies A central proposition of this book is that Marx did not claim to have written a handbook for revolutionaries applicable in all circumstances. As we shall see, there is some evidence that he denied that such a task was possible. Therefore, to decide what Marx would have said about the revolutionary potential of a country will be an act of interpretation, and an act of creating a coherent and systematic whole from his diverse and varied writings. As Marx spent over forty years actively analysing and discussing the social, economic and political issues of many countries, and debating his analyses and conclusions with colleagues and opponents, any attempt to deduce from his writings the Marxist analysis of the revolutionary potential and practice of a country at any stage of development would be bound to fail. The range of interpretations would be vast, as varied as the interpreters, and unanimity would be most unlikely. It follows, then, that it will never be possible to find the Marxist interpretation or analysis of any situation, especially one occurring afrer his death. While this seems a logical proposition, it is one that most Sinologists who specialize on the Chinese Revolution have been unwilling to accept. Indeed, they frequently imply that Marx had stated that his message had no relevance to countries such as China or to the rest of Asia. For example, some insist that 'the encounter between Marxism and the non European world required a mediation, which was carried out by Lenin' (Carrere d'encausse and Schram, 1969: 4). A basic question for the founders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), after they had read Marx, was whether his message was appropriate. Was it timely for them to embrace his analyses of economic and social developments and to adopt his praxis in order to bring about the desired changes - for a society based on Marxist socialism? They realized that China's economy was predominantly agrarian, with a large peasantry, and only at the beginning of the process of industrialization. As I have mentioned, the judgement in received Sinology is that the Marxian message was not appropriate to China at that time. As alluded to in the Introduction, Schwartz has claimed that the Chinese embraced Marxism not because of their knowledge of Marx but because they did not really understand Marx. The ideas of Schwartz and later Sinologists, and their implications, will be discussed in detail in Chapter 4. The aim of this chapter is briefly to survey the writings of Marx and Engels
A Marxian message to pre-industrialized societies 9 to try to discover their views on the appropriateness of societies in the East - industrially relatively undeveloped - commencing the journey to socialism. Attention will be given to those writings of Marx which the Chinese read before they embraced the Marxian message. To accomplish this task, it would be inappropriate to turn to the pages of his magnum opus, Capital, because Marx did not mean it 'to do more than trace the path by which, in Western Europe, the capitalist economic system emerged from the womb of the feudal economic system', and commented that though events may seem 'strikingly analogous', if they take place 'in different historical surroundings' they may lead 'to totally different results'. From early in his career, Marx had been interested in how differences in economic and political development would impact on the praxis of socialist liberation. He advised anyone with the ambition to effect social change to study 'each... evolution separately'. Then, 'comparing them, one can easily find the clue..., but one will never arrive there by using as one's master-key a general historico-philosophical theory, the supreme virtue of which consists in being supra-historical' (Marx, 1877 /1975: 293-4). He was confident that the socialist condition would one day spread over the whole world, but the way in which it would come about in any particular society, he felt, would depend on the stage of development of that society. In this passage, Marx effectively denied the possibility of a universal prescription applicable to all situations and to be followed by all social revolutionaries. In his introduction to A Contribution to the Critique on Hegel's Philosophy of Right, he examined this very issue by comparing the economically and politically more advanced France with Germany, then little more than a geographical term, and concluded thus: In France, partial emancipation is the basis of universal emancipation. In Germany, universal emancipation is the conditio sine qua non of any partial emancipation. In France it is the reality, in Germany the impossibility, of emancipation in stages that must give birth to complete freedom. He went on to say: Just as philosophy finds its material weapons in the proletariat, so the proletariat finds its intellectual weapons in philosophy; and once the lightning of thought has struck deeply into this virgin soil of the people, emancipation will transform the Germans into men. (Marx, 1843-4/1975: 255-7) Students of the history of Chinese Marxism may note that Marx's image of 'the lightning of thought' striking 'this virgin soil of the people' was echoed in Mao's statement which likened the peasants to blank sheets of paper so