Click on title to link to "China Essays Series" for an academic article from later than the period discussed in the book reviewed below, "Capitalism, Socialism and The 1949 Chinese Revolution: What Was The Cold War All About?". Once you get the basic academic facts of the Chinese revolution out of the way then you are 'ready' for the political questions. In short, the fate of the Chinese revolution in 2009 and the road forward.
Honor the 60th Anniversary Of The Chinese Revolution.
Book Review
Origins Of The Chinese Revolution, 1915-1949, Lucien Bianco, translated from the French by Muriel Bell, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 1971
I am a child of the Russian Revolution, the Bolshevik-led one of October 1917. Not literarily, of course, but by inclination even from way back in the days when I was nothing but a teenage snotty-nosed, half- wise liberal political manqué. That pro-Russian inclination, naturally, or at least it seemed natural to me then and still seems so to me now, came from being raised in one of the desperately working poor families in America in the 1950s. Any theory, philosophy or creed that promised that the working class would, and should, rule seemed mighty appealing even if I was fuzzy on the specifics of that proposition. I will not go into all the details of getting much less fuzzy on the specifics of that here, because I want to focus on the subject of the Chinese Revolution, but early on I actually wanted to meet and work with real, live communists here in America who represented to my mind, despite the hardened attitudes of the Cold War, the fruits of the Russian revolution.
And that is the nut, here. The more contemporary (in terms of my political evolution) Chinese revolution (victorious in 1949) did not hold nearly the attraction for this reviewer as did the Russian. And, that made sense, as well. After all, fuzzy or not about the details of the Chinese revolution as I was then, that revolution was a peasant revolution even if it was led by ostensibly Communist forces. Moreover, later, even at the height of the leftist curve in the late 1960s and early 1970s when guerrilla warfare was all the rage on the international left and one HAD to take sides in both the Soviet/Chinese dispute and which faction to support in the Chinese Cultural Revolution I tended to give a big yawn. What, it seems needless to say now, organic connections could a city boy, a hard core city boy at that who got nervous if he could not see the lights of the big city on the horizon, have with those who tilled the soil. All of this is by way of making something of an apology here for a somewhat neglectful absence of material about the Chinese revolution in this space. This will begin to be rectified in reviewing the work below and in future reviews as, from my perspective, the fate of that revolution hangs in the balance over the next years.
As we approach the 60th Anniversary of the victorious Chinese revolution of 1949 I believe that it is probably a good idea to review how that revolution happened. China, one way or another, has become a major player on the world economic scene since that time. Moreover, it represents the last major expression, in some recognizable form, of the Marxist idea of a workers state that drove the international politic of the 20th century. Although I would characterize the revolutionary upheaval in China in first half of the 20th century as predictable the victory of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was not so, rather it was a near thing. I would argue, and will do so at another time, that without the Russian revolution and the lessons learned there, even if not directly applied in China, the Chinese revolution would not have had the leadership necessarily to produce even an agrarian-centered revolution. Professor Bianco, the author of the work under review, would not necessarily agree with that conclusion. He nevertheless wrote an important book that while rather academic for the time of publication (late 1960s) is a very good primer for those who want a first gloss of what the Chinese revolution was all about.
There is, moreover, a certain method to my madness in choosing this book rather than another later one to introduce the various pre-revolutionary stages of the Chinese revolution. The period, as noted above, when Professor Bianco was writing his boo was a period of intense ideological struggle in the international left about which road to take to socialism- the Russian or Chinese? Moreover, this was the heyday of the ‘armchair’ guerilla revolutionary theorist, in the wake of the Cuban, Algerian and Vietnamese revolutions. Thus, Professor Bianco’s presentation of the stages of the Chinese revolution had a timely aspect in intersecting those disputes. Furthermore the professor book reflects some very different lessons from those that would be drawn today from a look at that same information. For examples, the well-touted vanguard role of the peasant in world revolution and the strategy of guerilla warfare in the fight against international imperialism have fallen off the political map.
So what has Professor Bianco to tell us as we struggle with the Chinese question today? Most importantly, that in the age of world imperialism as it emerged in the very early 20th century and the international expansion of the capitalist system (“globalization”, for you more modern terminological types) down to the “third world” farms meant that the old-fashioned Chinese “feudal” system with its archaic and hide-bound class structure that had survived helter-skelter for millennia was doomed. The fight to modernize China in the post-Empire period (1915), Western-style, led first by the intelligentsia as a class, then by various military types including Chiang-Kai-shek and his Kuomintang (KMT) (old style, as used in the book), and ultimately by Mao’s CCP/Red Army apparatus forms the heart of the book.
There are key moments in that fight, as highlighted in the book, some that have enduring importance others which seemed so at the time but have now been eclipsed. Thus the good professor informs us about the intellectuals who led May 4th Movement in 1919 and the subsequent founding of the CCP, the alliance between the KMT and the CCP that ended in disaster (for the CCP) in 1927, the various later attempts to utterly destroy the CCP and its withdrawal from the cities, the urban working classes and its hard turn to reliance on a peasant-based army (The Long March period). There is the military struggle with Japan that begins in earnest in the late 1930s, the eventual subordination of threat struggle to the dictates of the Western imperial powers, especially the Americans, and then post- World War II civil war that led to the CCP victory against the forces of the KMT in 1949.
Along with the narrative of key events the professor provides his take on the intellectual antecedents of the revolution, the social milieus (urban, rural, landlord, tenant, the various gradations of peasant farming and so on) that the various parties were working in and from which they drew their support, various interpretations that earlier analysts, including American agents, placed on the peasant revolution and prospects for extension of the revolution to other parts of Asia. This book is clearly not your last stop in finding out about the roots of the Chinese revolution but it certainly is a worthy starting point. Plus it contains a good bibliography, as to be expected in an academic work, which points you to other sources to round out the story.
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