Chapter 6

CANTON: THE COUP OF MARCH 20, 1926

IN THOSE DAYS at Canton, Chiang Kai-shek was like Cerberus, the three-headed guardian at the gates of Hell.

One head faced right and bore the face of Tai Chi-t'ao, who had become the chief organizer and propagandist for the conservative wing of the Kuomintang in Canton. Tai served as the link between the open Right Wing in Shanghai and the covert Right Wing in Canton. According to the simplified view of Kuomintang politics held by Borodin, the party was divided between those who supported the 1924 Reorganization and those who opposed it. The opponents were the Right, scurrying about their plots and intrigues in Shanghai and Peking. The supporters were the Left, the leaders of the Kuomintang in Canton. But Tai Chi-t'ao's presence in the Kuomintang capital and the scope of his activities there were proof enough that Canton already had its own well-developed Right Wing. Its connections with the conservative politicians in the North were well-established. As early as July 1925, when the National government was formed in Canton, Tai Chi-t'ao had already begun his activities under the tacit protection of Chiang Kai-shek. He began to issue anti-Communist and anti-Marxist pamphlets. He proclaimed the inalienable right of the "conscious" sections of the population to guide and govern the "unconscious." Communism, he said, had nothing in common with the doctrines of Sun Yat-sen, which had to be protected from the threat of Communist adulteration. Tai openly organized in behalf of the Sun Yat-senist Society, which at this time tried to distinguish itself carefully from its parent organization, the Western Hills Conference group. The Sun Yat-senists "declared that they differed from the Western Hills people on three points: 1. The Western Hills group was against the Reorganization of 1924, while they supported it. 2. The former consisted only of corrupt and reactionary bureaucrats and anarchists, while they were active revolutionaries. 3. The object . . . [of the Western Hills group] . . .was the overthrow of Wang and Chiang, while they accepted them as their leaders. But while belonging to the Left, they were as actively and energetically opposed to the Communists as were the Western Hills people. They also desired to break with the Communist Party.''1

The second head of Cerberus faced left. It bore Chiang's own face. From its lips dripped fealty to the cause of the revolution. "I, too, am willing," it said, "to lie beside the graves of those who have already fallen martyrs to the National Revolution, the Three People's Principles, and Communism. The revolution cannot do without Dr. Sun's Three People's Principles. Neither can the international revolution neglect Communism. We cannot deny that the Chinese Revolution is part of the World Revolution. The realization of the Three People's Principles means the realization of Communism. Knowing that we cannot separate the Chinese Revolution from the World Revolution, why should there be any quarrel amongst us about the Three People's Principles and Communism?"2

Cerberus' third head held the center and looked forward, the jealous guardian of sprouting ambition. To his left, Chiang heard himself establishing an identity between communism and Sun Yatsenism. To his right, he heard his man Tai Chi-t'ao proclaiming an ineradicable contradiction between them. From the left he drew sustenance, prestige before the masses, and Russian arms, money, and counsel. From the right he drew his basic political orientation and the people out of whom he fashioned his own power machine. In appointments to key posts, Chiang carefully chose only non-Communists. In these matters, it was easy for him to influence the party leader, Wang Ching-wei, a handsome, weak man who always believed himself to be in one camp and invariably ended up in the other, and who was destined to finish his career ignobly as a puppet of the Japanese.

In the Kuomintang organization, several Communists were members of the large Central Executive Committee, but no Communists were allowed posts in the party secretariat. The Military Council employed Russian technical advisers and the Political Department of the army was in most places dominated by individual Communists, but Communists were excluded from the general staff and the army's financial bureau. In the National government itself there NN-ere no Communists, only Borodin in an advisory capacity. On the other hand, in all the mass organizations, in the lower layers of the government and party machinery, Communists and their sympathizers carried on all the daily work and exerted the greatest personal influence. From them, the Canton Left Wing drew the strength which enabled it to reign supreme over the second National Congress of the Kuomintang which met in January 1926.

This Congress met under the glow of the great victories over local militarists and the sweep of popular mass organization. The number of organized workers in the country had reached 800,000. Peasant associations in Kwangtung alone had grown to a membership of 600,000. Hongkong was paralyzed by the strike and in Canton the pickets patrolled the streets and wharves of the city. The lessons of the unification of Kwangtung were still fresh in Kuomintang minds. There was still the rest of the country to win. So the Congress passed with acclaim resolutions which repeated the vague promises and phrases of the Kuomintang's "worker-peasant policy." It frowned on Cerberus No. 1 by mildly censuring Tai Chi-t'ao for his anti-Communist propaganda. It welcomed Cerberus No. 2 by electing Chiang Kai-shek, for the first time, to the Central Executive Committee of the Kuomintang. He was present to accept and dutifully to hail "the alliance with the Soviet Union, with the World Revolution."3 But Cerberus No. 3, the jealous, ambitious, calculating Chiang, chafed with impatient dissatisfaction, for at this Congress the supreme figure was Wang Ching-wei, head of the party and government, chairman of the Military Council, holder of all the high posts to which Chiang aspired.

Chiang Kai-shek had early come to regard himself as chief among the disciples of Sun Yat-sen. The murder of Liao Chung-k'ai and the remover of Hu Han-min left only Wang, Sun's longtime personal favorite, to rival his claim. Chiang was still only head of the Whampoa Academy and commander of the First Army, while Wang, as leader of party and government, not only exercised the leading civil power but, as chairman of the Military Council, represented civilian control over the military apparatus. Other military commanders who had joined the Kuomintang enjoyed an intolerable equality in the distribution of political and material advantages, especially in arms. In February, when the Soviet military delegation banqueted the Kuomintang leaders, a Russian officer made a toast in which he placed Wang’s name before Chiang's. A fellow guest says he saw Chiang go white and tight-lipped. Chiang "did not utter a word for the rest of the evening."4 Chiang was fiercely jealous of Wang's manifold prerogatives, and the politicians of the Right Wing knew very well how to play on the keyboard of Chiang's vanity. The Kuomintang old guard had early realized that through Chiang Kai-shek they had their best hope of regaining mastery. At the Western Hills Confererence, which Tai Chi-t'ao helped organize, they had adopted the slogan: "Ally with Chiang to overthrow Wang." At the time Chiang publicly repudiated any such idea but in private he undoubtedly cherished it. When a rump congress of the Right Wing met in Shanghai, also in January 1926, and insistently repeated its overtures, Chiang proved more receptive. Although the "Left" had seemingly triumphed and from Moscow the Comintern had hailed "the transformation of the Kuomintang into a resolute fighting force, into a real party of the Chinese revolution,"5 deep fissures were already beginning to show and the influence of the Right Wing was plainly discernible in Canton.

"The Right or anti-Red wing of the Kuomintang, with headquarters at Peking and Shanghai . . . has no small backing on the part of the less radical Kuomintangites in the southern capital. This has been felt by General Chiang and other comrades," wrote a perspicacious Chinese correspondent from Canton.6 This influence was no longer indirectly communicated. It was no longer a matter of emissaries and private parleys. Chang Ching-chiang, the Shanghai millionaire and the young Chiang's early benefactor, had personally come down to nurse his investment. He became Chiang Kai-shek's mentor, chief political aide, and counselor. Chiang's drive for power quickened. The object was to establish hegemony over the growing mass movement, to ensure that it would not exceed bourgeois interests. For this, concretely, it was necessary to whip the Communists into line, to regularize and define their position as auxiliaries to the Kuomintang. It was time, in short, to cut the political wages of the Communists, to increase the political profits of the bourgeoisie, and to place at the latter's disposal the immense and still untapped capital reserves of the mass movement. It was a question of stabilizing the leadership at the top by taking it out of the hands of vacillating liberals. For this a sharp blow had to be struck, damaging but not fatal, to the Communists and their petty bourgeois radical allies. If Canton's cliques of politician5 and generals were rift and rent by crisscrossing intrigues, it was only because many strove to strike this blow first. Thanks to Borodin, Chiang was in the favored position and it was he who decided to act.

The influence of the imperialists acted on the Right Wing, and through Chang Ching-chiang and the Sun Yat-senist Society, it reacted on Chiang Kai-shek. Their desires fused with his intense personal ambition, his cunning, his envy of political and military rivals, his flair for intrigue, his unmistakable lust for power. To level the Communists was to assure bourgeois hegemony over the masses. To subdue his rivals was to win for himself the leading place in the exercise of that hegemony. All the varicolored threads in this pattern were drawn swiftly into a knot. He became what Karl Marx, referring to Louis Napoleon, once called "a man who did not decide at night and act during the day but decided during the day and acted at night."

Several hours before dawn on the morning of March 20, 1926, Chiang's troops moved. The pretext was the allegedly threatening attitude of the gunboat Chungshan, which had anchored off Whampoa during the night. The incidents of that night cut across the lines of many complicated intrigues far too devious to be traced here, for the clashing wills of many ambitious individuals were involved. Chiang was not the only one who wanted to become master of the Kuomintang. But by this blow, he brushed all his rivals aside or took them into his camp. His detachments systematically carried out his orders. All political workers attached to units under his command, some fifty men, most of them Communists, were arrested. The headquarters of the Canton-Hongkong Strike Committee were raided and all arms found there were seized. All Soviet advisers in the city were placed under house arrest. Teng Yen-ta, a pro-Communist Kuomintang figure who had succeeded Liao Chung-k’ai as political director of the Whampoa Military Academy, was detained. Chiang had caught all his victims quite literally napping. Li Chih-lung, the Communist head of the Naval Bureau, was one of those dragged from their beds and carted off to the military prison.* Morning found Chiang Kai-shek master of Canton. It also found the other leaders of the Kuomintang in a state of panic and confusion. They were all 'utterly unprepared and did not even dream the coup was coming,"

* Li, who all unwittingly became the chief nominal object of the night's operations, has left behind the fullest account of the night's events in a pamphlet, The Resignation of Chairman Wang Ching-wei, which was published in 1927 at Wuhan.

according to Hua Kang, a Communist historian.7 They were all badly frightened.

Members of the Kuomintang Central Executive Committee hurriedly gathered. "Since Chiang Kai-shek has always struggled for the revolution, it is hoped that he will realize his mistake in this event," they ventured in a resolution. "But in view of the present situation, the comrades of the Left should temporarily retreat."8 For Wang Ching-wei this meant his departure from the scene. He fell conveniently ill. His biographer relates that he "considered the best way to solve the situation was for him to retreat and to allow Chiang to take charge of affairs for the time being."9 After an ignominious scene at the Mint, during which he handed over the seals of his authority to Chiang, he withdrew, first to a village near Canton and a few days later to European exile. Before leaving he wrote Chiang imploring him to keep to the "revolutionary" path. "If he would only do so, Wang did not mind sacrificing himself.''10

The Kuomintang "Lefts" weakly capitulated because Chiang's sudden descent upon them brought no corresponding pressure from the real Left, from the organized masses who were confused and completely uninformed as to what was taking place at the top.1l One foreign observer who arrived at Canton a few days later was delighted to discover that the Communists were in hiding and that the Russian advisers were packing to leave.12 It was not Chiang's intention as yet, however, to strike directly at the mass movement. He sought only to bring that movement under the assured control of the bourgeoisie and to concentrate that control in his own hands. Having successfully put the leaders of the "Left" to flight, he came forward with explanations to the workers. The events of March 20 and, in particular, I the raid on the strike headquarters, were due to a "misunderstanding," I he told them, and promised to reprimand the officers responsible. The Communists themselves were so completely confused that they did not know whether to believe him or not.13

Meanwhile Right-Wing politicians, until now on the outside looking in, poured into Canton from their Hongkong and Shanghai refuges. A plenary session of the Kuomintang Central Executive Committee was called for May 15, and, as the date for that meeting approached, a deliberately manufactured pogrom atmosphere enveloped the city. Walls were covered with posters warning against mysterious "provocations," and rumors of an impending Communist coup against the government were set in circulation. A run was staged on the Central Bank. On the eve of the conference martial law was suddenly clamped down on the city. No one outside of Chiang's immediate entourage had the faintest notion of what to expect.

At the opening session Chiang introduced and put through a special resolution "for the readjustment of party affairs." It was framed to limit and define within the closest possible bounds the organizational activity of the Communist members of the Kuomintang. Communists were required "not to entertain any doubt on or criticise Dr. Sun or his principles." The Communist party was required to hand over to the standing committee of the Kuomintang Executive a list of its membership inside the Kuomintang. Communist members of municipal, provincial, and central party committees were limited to one-third of the committee membership. Communists were banned from serving as heads of any party or government department. Kuomintang members, on the other hand, were enjoined "not to engage in any other political organization or activity." That is, Communists could join the Kuomintang, but members of the Kuomintang could not join the Communist party without forfeiting their Kuomintang cards. All instructions henceforth issued by the Communist Central Committee to its own members were to be submitted first to a special joint committee of the two parties for approval. 14

Thoroughly lacing the Communists into this political strait jacket, Chiang at the same time took all power in his own hands. The coup of March 20 had destroyed the authority of the civilian Military Council and the removal of Wang Ching-wei had left Chiang in undisputed control of all party and government affairs. The May 15 plenary session regularized these changes. Chiang was formally put at the head of the party and he promptly deputized Chang Ching-chiang to act for him as chairman of the Central Executive Committee. Plans for launching a northern military expedition were also approved and Chiang Kai-shek was appointed commander-in-chief of all the expeditionary armies. Subsequently a set of special decrees conferred emergency powers upon Chiang for the duration of the campaign. All government and party offices were subordinated to the headquarters of the commander-in-chief. The Military Council, originally conceived as a civilian check on militarist ambitions, passed entirely into Chiang's hands. He became arbiter of the government's finances. He controlled the Political Department, the arsenal, the general staff, the military and naval schools. The Canton government was transformed into a military dictatorship. Chiang's victory was complete.

It would seem reasonable to expect that this bloodless seizure of power by Chiang Kai-shek in Canton would have set the warning bells ringing for the Chinese Communists and their mentors in the Kremlin at Moscow. They had before them the remarkably accurate prediction made by Lenin in 1920 that in the colonial revolutionary movements every effort would be made by the bourgeois nationalists to seize and keep control of the movement in order to facilitate a compromise with the imperialist Powers. He had even warned that in this process the bourgeois nationalists would try to cloak themselves in the mantle of Communism. He had warned that the Communists would have to preserve their own independence, preserve their own leadership, and prevent the national revolution from being derailed.15 Lenin had since died and his ideas had been embalmed along with his corpse. But now Stalin had before him, on a grand scale in China, a test and a confirmation of the analysis Lenin had made. If, unlike Lenin, the Kremlin strategists could not forsee the event, they were at least now confronted with the accomplished fact. Unlike Lenin, however, the new leaders were not concerned with the dynamics of the revolutionary struggle, which remained a closed book to them. They were concerned with winning a strong ally in a new nationalist China. They were convinced that the Chinese bourgeoisie was, and would have to remain, such an ally. They were quite ready to accept the fact of its hegemony in the national revolution, whatever the cost to the Chinese Communists or the masses of the Chinese people. Lenin had warned against surrendering leadership to "bourgeois democrats." Stalin was quite ready to have the Chinese Communists surrender leadership to a military dictator. Stalin and his colleagues still had to justify their policies in revolutionary terms, however, and Chiang's coup in Canton was on this score not easy to explain. So they chose the interesting alternative of not explaining it at all. They simply denied that it had taken place. They suppressed all news of its occurrence.

The facts were kept out of the Russian press and the international Communist press. They were concealed from the members of the Executive Committee of the Comintern and even from the presidium of the Executive Committee. For this there is the testimony of members of both these bodies.16 When news of the coup was published in China and abroad, with specific facts often garbled but containing the essentially true assertion that power in Canton had passed into the hands of Chiang Kai-shek, the centrally geared machinery of the Comintern began turning out vehement denials. The central organ q' the Comintern on April 8, 1926, said:

Reuter's Telegraphic Agency . . . recently issued the statement that in Canton, Chiang Kai-shek, the supreme commander of the revolutionary troops (whom Reuter had hitherto described as a red), had carried out a coup d'etat. But this Iying report had soon to be denied.... The Kuomintang is not a tiny group with a few members but is a mass party in the true sense of the word and the revolutionary Canton troops and the revolutionary Canton government are founded on this basis. It is, of course, impossible there to carry out a coup d'etat overnight.

Far from being converted into an instrument of bourgeois policy, the Canton government was more than ever "aiming at world revolution" and extending its power into the neighboring provinces as a "Soviet government." The prospects

were never so favorable as they are now.... The province of Kwangsi will shortly form a Soviet government.... The power of the generals, as a result of the national revolutionary movement, is beginning to disappear. The Kuomin government is now proceeding to organize all district and town administrations within the province of Kwangtung according to the Soviet system.17 [All italics in the original.]

A Moscow dispatch to the New York Daily Worker in April said:

The reactionary British press at Hongkong and in London have spread sensational stories of disruption within the Nationalist government in an effort to further their imperialist propaganda. These reports have no real basis. They are nothing but provocative maneuvers of British imperialism There has been no insurrection in Canton. The basis of the reports seems to be certain differences between a general of the Canton army, Chiang Kai-shek, and the Canton government. These differences were not concerned with matters of principle and had no connection with an armed struggle for power. The differences have since been abolished and Canton remains the stronghold of the movement for the emancipation of the Chinese people. The attempt of British imperialism to utilize the unimportant differences in Canton in its own interests has failed.... The Moscow press regards this provocative maneuver of the British reactionary press as an exposure of the real plans of British imperialism with regard to Canton. Izvestia writes: "The wish was the father of the thought and the British imperialists presented their real intentions as a fait accompli.''18

If it were conceivable that these denials arose out of genuine ignorance of the facts, the same could hardly be said of the report of the Comintern representative, G. Voitinsky, writing from Canton:

The British imperialists . . . were vainly attempting to provoke an insurrection in Canton and at the same time trumpeting forth to the whole world that the Canton government had already fallen, that the Right Wing of the Kuomintang had seized power and formed a government which had agreed to a compromise with the British and was arresting partisans of the Left Kuomintang as well as the Communists. All this proved to be an invention of the imperialists.... The Canton government, which was "overthrown" by the imperialist press is now actually stronger than ever.19

As late as the end of 1926, the highest body of the Comintern deliberated on the situation in China and produced a resolution which, as we shall have occasion to show, made no mention whatever of the March events in Canton or their sequel.

Borodin, who had been on a trip to the north, returned to Canton after the coup but before the Kuomintang plenary session of May 15. An American observer, who was already in connection with some of Chiang Kai-shek's closest advisers (and who later entered the service of Chiang's government), arrived in Canton a few days later. According to his account:

The Russians seemed to believe the game was up. Most of the Chinese Communists were in hiding.... The anti-Communists were jubilant.... Borodin had it out with Chiang. Chiang wanted to know how far Russia would support him in a military expedition against the North. Borodin had heretofore opposed the Northern Expedition. Chiang's attitude toward the continuance of the Russian alliance depended upon Borodin's attitude toward the Northern Expedition. They came to an agreement. The Russians would support the Northern Expedition. The Russian alliance was continued. The Communists were reinstated.20

Subsequently, according to other accounts, "Chiang's relations with Borodin became more cordial than ever''21 and all the decisions of the Kuomintang session of May 15 "were fully endorsed by M. Borodin."32 It is further recorded that all the emergency powers delegated to Chiang after his appointment as commander-in-chief were delegated "at the advice of Borodin."23 It is in any case a fact that Borodin, and after him the leaders of the Chinese Communist party, submitted without question to the military dictatorship established as a result of the March 20 coup. Borodin even saw to it that the Russian military advisers who had incurred Chiang's displeasure were dismissed and replaced by more amenable colleagues. In most cases this involved Russian officers who had worked with Chinese army formations not under Chiang's direct control. Chiang could hardly have asked for more. Having secured all these gains with far less difficulty than he himself must have imagined possible, he dispensed with some of the Right-Wing conspirators who had helped him execute his coup. He sent them out of Canton. He needed more than ever now to reappear as a "Leftist." His Right-Wing associates could wait for him in Shanghai.

In his account of these events, which unqualifiedly gives Borodin's version and apologia, Louis Fischer describes the sequel to March 20 as follows: "But Chiang, whose distinguishing characteristic was not courage, apparently had been frightened by his own action and sent . . . a humble letter begging Borodin to return south without delay." When Borodin got back, Chiang "overflowed with apologies. . . . What, he asked of Borodin, must he do? 'Prepare for the Northern Expedition,' Borodin replied." Then, it was "because Borodin wished to repair some of the damage done by the coup of March 20" that Chiang "engineered a second coup . . . this time against the Right."

"But why did not Borodin, the Left Kuomintang, and the Chinese Communist Party eliminate Chiang Kai-shek?" Fischer continues. "Because they were too weak," he replies, after Borodin.

. . . They had wide mass sympathy but in Canton they wielded insufficient forces to overcome Chiang and the bourgeoisie which supported him.... Both sides knew that the struggle between them was inevitable. But rather than engage now in bloodletting from which only the Cantonese militarists could gain, they tacitly agreed to postpone the issue until they reached the Yangtze. The resolution to commence the Northern Expedition was adopted by the Kuomintang Central Committee on May 15. At that meeting the expressed sentiments of each faction amounted to this: "Gentlemen, we know we must fight one another. But we need a wider area. Let us delay the day of reckoning and meanwhile go forward to a common goal."24

Fischer's account omits all mention of the other resolutions adopted on May 15, which all but hog-tied the Communist party. It was postponed, but if, as Fischer avers, Borodin was preparing to give future battle to Chiang Kaishek, one might ask why all weapons and all power were surrendered in advance. Contrary to Borodin's post factum version, the facts on the record show that it was Chiang Kai-shek who acted with boldness

and Stalin-Borodin & Company who retreated in panic. Acting under their orders, the Chinese Communists now had to capitulate, even to

grovel, before the new master of the Nationalist movement.

In an open letter addressed to Chiang Kai-shek on June 4, Ch'en Tu-hsiu protested further:

At this time to conspire for the overthrow of Chiang Kai-shek in Canton—what a help to the reactionary forces this would be! If the Chinese Communist Party is such a counter-revolutionary party, it should be got rid of.... If among the comrades of the Communist Party there are any who harbor ideas of such a counter-revolutionary conspiracy, you should shoot them without the least ceremony. But I know, I am convinced, that in our party nobody has any such idea in mind.26

As evidence that such ideas did exist in the minds of Communists, Chiang Kai-shek, in a speech at Canton shortly after March 20, had recalled the remark of a certain Communist who had said: "In our organization there is a Tuan Ch'i-jui* and in order to overthrow the northern Tuan Ch'i-jui we must first overthrow the Tuan Ch'i-jui in our midst." The Communist who had made the offending speech hastened into print with an open letter to Chiang explaining that he had meant "Tuan Ch'i-jui ideology," that is, old feudal ideas, and that since he spoke Anhwei dialect and not Cantonese, there had been a mistake made by the interpreter.

I never slandered you in my words and it is everywhere open and clear that what I said was to love and protect you for the sake of the national revolution.... I remember that after March 20 I met you ... and earnestly expressed to you my attitude of everlasting confidence in you. If you truly regarded me as a comrade, you should have taught me; or if you saw anything wrong in me, you should have severely blamed me or chastised me and made me correct my error. But you only mildly and indifferently replied, "Never mind, never mind, nothing, nothing. . . " So now why do you charge me with slander and ulterior motives?27

The man who wrote this letter, Kao Yu-han, was not an obscure individual but a leading member of the Communist party who also held office on the Supervisory Committee of the Kuomintang.

While the March 20 coup was met with denials and reproaches, the resolutions of the May 15 plenary session were unquestioningly accepted, the Communists seeking every devious means of rationalizing and justifying them. "When the imperialists saw it [the resolution on the readjustment of party affairs], they may have suspected that your party had fallen into their trap and had voluntarily broken the revolutionary front in order to turn to the Right... ." said an official letter from the Central Committee of the Communist party to the Kuomintang, "but it may be that your party did this because the form of cooperation between our party and yours has for several years aroused suspicion and jealousy in certain quarters.... Therefore you tried to make several changes in the form of cooperation in order to do away with unnecessary suspicion and jealousy, and later to purify the ranks, deal blows against the reactionaries, consolidate the revolutionary front and proceed to fight against the imperialist and militarist rule and oppression with all your might. If this is the case, then there is no fundamental conflict in the policy of cooperation with our party. The principal thing is to consolidate the revolutionary forces against imperialism, no matter what the form of consolidation and cooperation is. If such is the case, the spirit of alliance between our two parties will not be dampened.... Your resolution ... is a question for your own party and no matter what you decide in connection therewith, [we] have not the right to accept or reject."28

* Tuan Ch'i-jui was head of the notoriously corrupt government at Peking.

On May 28, the Canton correspondent of the Communist Guide Weekly wrote that in view of the fact that the May 15 plenary session had adopted "a declaration for the consolidation of all revolutionary elements against the reaction, no fundamental change in the policy of cooperation had taken place," and that

a mere resolution on party affairs is not sufficient to indicate a Rightward development of the Kuomintang Central Executive Committee. The Communists clearly recognize that the present situation of the revolution demands a strong and consistent revolutionary front. Their attitude toward the new resolution of the Kuomintang Central Executive Committee is guided by this criterion. The Communist fraction in the Kuomintang plenary session did not dispute in the least . . . the internal organization of the Kuomintang.*

This complete capitulation at Borodin's orders did not take place without some protest inside the ranks of the Communist party. A group of members in Shanghai opposed the course of surrender and demanded the immediate withdrawal of the party from the Kuomintang, declaring that it was impossible for Communists to work under the conditions laid down by the May 15 Kuomintang resolutions. Both the Central Committee in Shanghai and the Kwangtung party vigorously opposed this demand. The Kwangtung committee considered that to withdraw from the Kuomintang would mean to abandon the toiling masses, to abandon the banner of the revolutionary Kuomintang to the bourgeoisie. This would be an irretrievable loss. At this time, a policy of temporary retreat must be pursued in order to remain in the Kuomintang.29

* The author of this report, Ts'ao Szu-yuan, paid with his life for not having "disputed in the least" the new state of affairs in the Kuemintang. He was murdered a year later by Chiang Kai-shek's executioners.

Despite this, signs appeared that even the leadership had accepted Borodin's decisions with some reluctance. There were second thoughts. The pressure to regain some measure of party independence was so strong that in June the Central Committee of the Communist party decided to propose that the Communist party resume its own existence and replace its current submersion inside the Kuomintang with a formal two-party bloc.30 This decision was sent to the Comintern in Moscow where it was immediately and drastically condemned and rejected. In Moscow, the Opposition led by Trotsky had already begun to demand the liberation of the Chinese Communists from the strait jacket of the Kuomintang and the proposal that arrived from China much too uncomfortably suggested that the Chinese party, which had no connection with nor any knowledge of the internal fight in Russia, was coming to the same conclusion as the Opposition. This could not be permitted, or even considered. The same official Comintern article which nearly one year later revealed for the first time that the March 20 coup had placed the Kuomintang under the control of its Right Wing also disclosed, likewise for the first time, that the Communists in China had demanded their freedom and that this demand had been ordered "revised." Even the Chinese Communist proposal to organize Left-Wing fractions within the Kuomintang—a remarkable confession that the so-called Left did not even have a fractional organization of its own—was condemned in favor of a policy of "directing the entire Kuomintang to the Left and guaranteeing it a stable Left policy.''81

In China, Borodin and the other agents of Russia and the Comintern clamped down on the impulse of the Chinese Communists to try an independent political policy of their own. Chten Tu-hsiu quotes Borodin as saying at this time: "The present period is one in which the Communists should do coolie service for the Kuomintang!"32 Proposals to withdraw from the Kuomintang had been squelched because they meant "abandoning the banner of the revolutionary Kuomintang to the bourgeoisie." The only difficulty was that this banner was already abandoned to the bourgeoisie. It was firmly in the hands of the aspiring dictator, Chiang Kai-shek, and the Right Wing. The masses generally were never informed of this fact but were left to learn it suddenly and catastrophically. The coup of March 20, 1926, presents the remarkable spectacle of a huge mass movement, led by Communists, being painlessly deflected from the course of its own

Pages missing 104,105, 106, 107.

But even the proposal to buy out of the strike for $10,000,000 soon fell through. The bargaining position of the Canton government had collapsed as soon as it became apparent to the British that Canton's rulers no longer spoke for the workers and, in fact, were as anxious as the British to end the strike. The parleys were dropped. On September 3, a British naval landing party cleared the wharves of the Canton West Bund of worker-pickets. In protest against this act, Eugene Ch'en asked for the "retirement of the British gunboats now moored along the jetties to their usual anchorage off the Shameen."43 This was a far cry from the demand for the removal of all British vessels from Kwangtung waters. But the back of the strike movement was already broken. On October 10, 1926, the Canton government unconditionally called off both strike and boycott. The Kuomintang and the Strike Committee explained that this step was required "by the change in the national situation brought about by the extension of Nationalist power and influence to the Yangtze." The termination of a historic fifteen months' struggle without a single concession to the demands of the workers who conducted it was termed in this statement "not a defeat but a great victory."44

"Imperialism either had to capitulate to China," explained Borodin later, ". . . or China acknowledge defeat. Since, however, defeat could not be countenanced, it became necessary to terminate the battle in this corner in order to start out with greater vigor to fight imperialism throughout China—on the wider base."45 Defeat could not be "countenanced" and therefore had to be rationalized into a victory. It was necessary to conceal the fact that the strategic moment had long since passed and the decisive positions had long since been yielded

to the enemy without a struggle. The Hongkong strike and boycott had opened wide the door to an independent working-class initiative and had demonstrated the ability of the workers to function independently in their own interests. I5nder the mentorship of the Comintern and Borodin, the Chinese Communists had let the opportunity slip by without ever having recognized it. The workers of Canton and Hongkong had to pay dearly for this "victory."

Following the voluntary liquidation of the strike and boycott, the Governor of Hongkong happily declared that "we may reasonably hope that a determined effort will now be made by the Cantonese authorities to re-establish law and order." Hongkong desired to see in Kwangtung and kwangsi "a strong, stable, and enlightened government; of such a government we should gladly be close friends and staunch supporters."43 With the departure of the National government to the Yangtze in December, the task of re-establishing "law and order" in Kwangtung passed to the Kwangsi militarist, Li Chi-shen, who took over full control. Strict police measures were enforced against the workers. A set of stringent regulations was issued ordering arbitration of all disputes and forbidding workers to possess or carry arms, to make arrests, to picket shops or factories. In the face of these measures, the pickets and other workers' volunteer groups were "instructed by the Workers' Delegates Conference, acting under the auspices of the Communist Party, to remain indoors for the present pending readjustment of their standing." Anxious only to propitiate Li Chi-shen, the Communists hastily ended their agitation for a popular re-election of delegates to the various provincial Kuomintang organizations. They made no protest when Li Chi-shen reorganized the party, filling all posts with his own appointees. There was no resistance. Canton was tight in the militarist grip. The capitulation of the Communists was complete.47

This was Canton when a delegation of the Communist International arrived for a visit on February 17, 1927. The delegation consisted of Earl Browder, the American Communist leader, Tom Mann, the British Communist trade-union figure and Jacques Doriot of the Prench Communist party. They inspected the outer shell of the mass movement that still remained and were feted by the local dictator, Li Chi-shen, who told them that "never, never would the Nationalist government proceed against the interests of the working class."48 They sent their greetings to Chiang Kai-shek, who wired back his welcome.49 Their first reports to the international Communist press glowed with pride in "revolutionary Canton" and were unmarred by any suggestion of the presence of discord.50 At the graves of the Hongkong pickets killed in action during the strike they laid wreaths with this inscription: "The martyred Hongkong pickets symbolize the great contribution of the Chinese working class to the Chinese revolution and the world revolution."5'

Six months later, when events had long since taken their course, the delegation wrote of its visit to Canton:

The Northern Expedition was in full swing and the Canton merchants cleverly utilized the slogan of the united revolutionary front in order to free themselves of all obligations to the working class.... Some of the leaders of the Canton proletariat were far from clear in their policy in the face of this clever and demagogic tactic of the bourgeoisie.... [They] neglected . . . the fundamental class interests of the proletariat for fear of breaking the united front with the bourgeoisie.... The only class, it seems, which took the slogan of the "united front" of all anti-imperialist forces seriously was the proletariat and its revolutionary leaders.... This was undoubtedly a mistake which later cost the Chinese working class much sacrifice and good blood.52