The Soviet Union and Communist China 1945-1950: The Arduous Road to the Alliance

The Arduous Road to the Alliance

Dieter Heinzig

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317454489
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Drawing on a wealth of new sources, this work documents the evolving relationship between Moscow and Peking in the twentieth century. Using newly available Russian and Chinese archival documents, memoirs written in the 1980s and 1990s, and interviews with high-ranking Soviet and Chinese eyewitnesses, the book provides the basis for a new interpretation of this relationship and a glimpse of previously unknown events that shaped the Sino-Soviet alliance. An appendix contains translated Chinese and Soviet documents - many of which are being published for the first time. The book focuses mainly on Communist China's relationship with Moscow after the conclusion of the treaty between the Soviet Union and Kuomingtang China in 1945, up until the signing of the treaty between Moscow and the Chinese Communist Party in 1950. It also looks at China's relationship with Moscow from 1920 to 1945, as well as developments from 1950 to the present. The author reevaluates existing sources and literature on the topic, and demonstrates that the alliance was reached despite disagreements and distrust on both sides and was not an inevitable conclusion. He also shows that the relationship between the two Communist parties was based on national interest politics, and not on similar ideological convictions.

1

Background

The Emancipation of the Chinese Communist Party from Moscow

As the Second World War drew to a close, leaders in the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had every reason to look back with mixed feelings on the evolution of their mutual relations to that point. On the one hand, they continued to feel the bond of their common Marxist-Leninist ideology and eschatological belief in world revolution. On the other, both sides had constantly pursued their own policy interests, and these had repeatedly led to conflicting goals and irritations.

The first tensions had already emerged during the 1920s. Mao Zedong’s rise to power as Party leader, which began in 1935, increased the number of conflicts considerably and initiated the process by which the CCP became emancipated from Moscow—that was completed by the end of the war. The period from 1935 to 1945 is thus considerably more significant to the topic of this book than the one that preceded it. In this chapter, we will therefore focus our historical review on this period, and the following section will provide only a cursory sketch of developments between 1921 and 1935.¹

The CCP on the Comintern Leash (1921–35)

We can only understand the early relations between Moscow and the Chinese Communists if we view them in the context not only of Soviet policy toward China but also of the USSR’s overall foreign policy. The latter shifted during the first half of the 1920s from an internationalist to a nationalist Russian course. In 1927, Stalin reduced the result of this process casually and pedantically to the slogan that “he is revolutionary and internationalist who is prepared to protect the Soviet Union unreservedly and unconditionally.”²

The Communist International (Comintern), founded in 1919, became the leash by which Moscow communicated its policies to the other Communist parties. From 1920, the resolutions of the congresses and the Executive Committee of the Comintern (ECCI) were binding on all Communist parties as “sections” of the Comintern.³ The Comintern was entitled by statute to intervene in the affairs of individual parties at any time. All important Comintern resolutions were formulated not by the Comintern itself, however, but in the Politburo of the Central Committee (CC) of the Russian Communist Party.⁴ After its Fourth World Congress in 1922, the Comintern advocated Soviet interests ever more clearly. Nikolai Bukharin demanded that the proletariat of other countries defend the Soviet state.

At the Fifth World Congress (1925), the sections were required to take the experiences of the Russian CP extensively into account. Between 1925 and 1930, the Comintern finally became a tool Stalin used to discipline foreign Communist parties in the pursuit of Soviet interests. On a visit to Moscow in 1928, the Chinese Communist Zhang Guotao received the impression that the Comintern was no longer “the general headquarters for the world revolution” but had become “Stalin’s plaything for bullying the Communists of various nations.”⁵

Moscow had already begun to pursue nationalist Russian interests associated with the traditions of czarist expansionism in China in mid-1919. One clear indication of this is the fact that the Soviet government rescinded the offer it had already made to Peiping to return the Chinese Eastern Railroad (CER) without compensation.⁶ It became clear that the Soviet Union wished to preserve or restore Russia’s traditional influence in Manchuria and Outer Mongolia. Three years later, Chang Tso-lin, then the ruler of Manchuria, told Sun Yat-sen what he thought about Soviet behavior to China. He said that Moscow was pursuing an imperialist policy in China, because, despite all its protestations of friendship, it was not returning the Chinese Eastern Railroad or Mongolia.⁷ In subsequent years, the Soviet leadership’s attempts to follow the legacy of czarist Russia in its policy toward China offended all political forces in China—from the warlords through the Kuomintang (KMT) to the Communists, whose leaders considered themselves Chinese patriots in addition to accepting the dogma of world revolution. As will be shown in detail below, this was particularly true of Mao Zedong.⁸

Since 1922, the reins of China policy in the Soviet leadership had clearly all come together with Stalin.⁹ In 1928, Otto Kuusinen, the ECCI secretary, confirmed that Stalin was the supreme authority on all matters that involved China.¹⁰ It is therefore legitimate to use the terms “Soviet Union,” “Soviet leadership,” “Comintern,” “Moscow,” and “Stalin” interchangeably with regard to Soviet policy toward China, as we have done in the present book.

The Chinese CP was founded in 1921 under the auspices of the Comintern. Differences had already emerged between Moscow and the Chinese Communists during the 1920s. They were primarily due to the fact that Stalin chose to deal with the KMT as the USSR’s preferred partner in China—a strategy that he essentially maintained until the end of the 1940s.¹¹ His idea was that the KMT, as the strongest progressive political force in the country, would best be able to defeat the reactionary warlords, unify China, remove it from any (non-Soviet) foreign influence, and thus prepare it, if unintentionally, for the Communist seizure of power, which the CCP would carry through under Soviet direction. The Chinese Communists, whose primary goal was to seize power in the struggle with the KMT, initially played no significant role in Moscow’s calculations because they were too weak militarily and politically. This lasted until Stalin realized in late 1948 that they were about to be victorious in the civil war.

The first tensions emerged when Moscow instructed the CCP through the Comintern to form a bloc with the KMT in 1922. This constituted the basis of Soviet military aid between 1923 and 1927, which for the most part benefited only the KMT. Despite the fact that Chiang Kai-shek had severely restricted the influence of the Communists and Soviet military advisers in the KMT in a kind of coup d’état on March 20, 1926, the Comintern continued to cling to the alliance with Chiang.

After the signs of the imminent massacre of unionized workers Chiang arranged in Shanghai on April 12, 1927, had become clear, the Comintern advised the Communists and the workers to avoid open conflict and thus was in great part responsible for the fact that they were headed for disaster. Even after that, Comintern delegates in Wuhan continued to seek to maintain the united front with Chiang. Only several days later did the ECCI bring itself to condemn Chiang Kai-shek as a “traitor to the revolution.” Chiang’s right wing in the KMT, which Stalin wanted to “utilize to the end, squeeze out like a lemon, and then fling away,”¹² made the break with the Chinese Communists and the Comintern in April 1927. Stalin then instructed the CCP leadership through Mikhail Borodin to support the left-wing KMT government in Wuhan, to which the Communists should cling like to a lifesaver.¹³ When the Wuhan KMT also expelled the Communists in July, the Soviet military advisers had no alternative but to leave China. Stalin cynically blamed the CCP leadership under Chen Duxiu for clinging so long to the alliance with the KMT: Chen was made the scapegoat, and Qu Qiubai replaced him as secretary-general.¹⁴

In the summer of 1927, Moscow and the Chinese CP resorted to organizing armed uprisings in four provinces, all of which failed. This was apparently done on the initiative of Stalin, who was trying in this way to use the dispute with the Trotskyite opposition to cover over the errors in his China policy to that point. The Comintern agent Besso Lominadze and the chief Soviet military adviser, Vasilii Bliukher, took part in the consultations with the CCP leadership. The first revolts took place on August 1 in Nanchang. The “autumn harvest uprisings” followed in rural areas of Hunan, Hubei, Jiangxi, and Guangdong provinces and in Changsha city. An armed revolt in Canton in December, which the Comintern agent Heinz Neumann had played a significant role in planning and implementing, also failed.¹⁵ These setbacks resulted in bloody losses to the Chinese Communists, while Neumann escaped. Despite this, it was the CCP leadership—and not the Comintern—that had to exercise self-criticism in connection with the failed uprisings and for clinging so long to its cooperation with the KMT at the Sixth Comintern Congress in July 1928: the Party leadership had, it confessed, made “serious opportunistic mistakes.” And at the Seventh Party Conference of the CCP in June–July 1928 in Moscow, which the Comintern kept on a tight leash, the CCP leadership under Qu Qiubai, but not Stalin, bore the full blame for the failure of the revolts during the second half of 1927: it had allegedly followed a “putschist line.” The congress took place in the shadows of the conflict between Stalin and Bukharin. The CCP leadership had already criticized Mao previously for the failure of the “autumn harvest uprisings” he had planned in Hunan.¹⁶

Moscow’s tactic of infiltrating Chinese Communists into the KMT came to nothing. In December 1927, the Nationalist Government of the reunited KMT in Nanking broke off diplomatic relations with the USSR. Soviet policy toward China had thus failed across the board. Chiang Kai-shek conquered the warlords in North China in 1928 and began a campaign of annihilation against the Communists in the south.

It was obvious that the directives from Moscow had resulted in a debacle for the Chinese Communists. Only scattered cells in a few large cities, the remains of rebel troop units, and numerous peasant troops were left to the Party. Independently of the Party leadership, which remained obedient to the Comintern and was seeking to reconstruct Communist organizations in the cities, Mao united his peasant troops with troops under Zhu De in the mountains of the border area between Hunan and Jiangxi in spring 1928, and formed a Soviet region. Soviet regions also arose in other provinces such as Hunan, Hubei, Anhui, and Fujian. They were conceived as fixed territorial bases from which the revolution would be carried to the cities. Mao had drawn the conclusion from the failure of the city revolts, which the Comintern had recommended, that the revolution could only be carried out successfully from the villages. A new trend in Chinese Communism that was largely independent of Moscow and of the CCP leadership of the time thus began that would ultimately be successful.¹⁷

Stalin viewed Mao’s and Zhu’s actions with skepticism—above all because he had not approved them in advance. Moscow had after all also learned from the mistakes of the past with respect to revolutionary tactics. In February 1928, the ECCI recommended to the CCP leadership to avoid coup attempts in the cities and peasant uprisings for the time being. They should instead carry out land reform in Soviet regions and begin a guerrilla war from there—an idea not unlike Mao’s. These recommendations also influenced the resolutions of the Sixth CCP Party Congress.¹⁸ From February 1930, the CCP leadership under Li Lisan criticized Mao Zedong and Zhu De—albeit from Shanghai—for clinging to the “old-fashioned ideas” of “evasive distraction.” Their troops, it argued, should move against important cities and major lines of communication instead. The concept of surrounding the cities from the countryside was supposedly a great mistake. In August, Li developed a general plan for conquering Changsha, Nanchang, and other major cities.¹⁹ To carry it out, he requested the support of a military intervention by Moscow in North and East China. When the Comintern refused to provide this, Li accused it of violating the principle of internationalism and threatened to terminate his Party’s loyalty to Moscow. The “Li Lisan line,” which was not based on instructions from Moscow, ended in fiasco when the conquest of Changsha failed in August and September.²⁰

The Comintern then intervened directly in its Chinese section’s leadership structure. It ordered Li Lisan to come to Moscow, where members of the ECCI cross-examined him in November, ordered him to exercise self-criticism, and prohibited him from returning to China. At the same time, the ECCI sent Pavel Mif (Mikhail Fortus), deputy head of the Eastern Secretariat of the ECCI, to China, where he arranged to replace the CCP leadership with a group of Chinese comrades loyal to the Comintern and trained in Moscow in January 1931. Their opponents in the Party gave them nicknames such as “the twenty-eight Bolsheviks [ershiba ge buershiweike]” and “the Chinese Stalin group” [Zhongguo Si-da-lin pai].” They were led by Wang Ming (Chen Shaoyu), who had been trained in Moscow at the Sun Yat-sen University in the mid-1920s and was distinguished by his unquestioning loyalty to the Soviet—or to what he took to be the Soviet—line until 1974, when he died in exile in Moscow. He returned to Moscow in 1932, where he represented the Chinese CP in the Comintern until 1937. In this capacity, he supported the Party leadership that remained in Shanghai until 1933 in its attempts to gain control of the various rural Soviet regions, and of the Central Soviet Region under Mao Zedong in Jiangxi in particular.²¹

For various reasons, the Comintern’s influence diminished somewhat after 1931. The CCP leadership apparently heard from a courier in late 1935 that in response to the resolutions of the Seventh World Congress of the Comintern, the ECCI would in future no longer intervene in the Chinese Communists’ organizational affairs and would only continue to supervise their policies.²² It became clear one year later that this supervision continued to be designed to serve Soviet and not Chinese interests when the Comintern interpreted Japan’s aggression against China as actually directed against the Soviet Union, called on all Communist parties “to protect the USSR,”²³ and made no mention of protecting China.

Thus concluded the first chapter in the relations between Moscow and the Chinese Communists, which had for the most part been characterized by a high degree of Soviet influence over the Chinese CP. For the most part, it did not end because of the restrictions the Comintern imposed on itself in late 1935. Instead, developments within the Communist Party that Moscow could not influence largely brought about the change.

Mao Zedong’s Rise to Party Leader: Prerequisite for Emancipation

The new development, which began in 1935, led step-by-step to the CCP’s emancipation from the Soviet Union by 1945. The most important step in this development can be seen to have begun when Mao Zedong was able to assert his authority against the faction subservient to Moscow that had predominated to that point in an Enlarged Session of the Politburo in Zunyi (Guizhou Province) during the legendary Long March in January 1935. Mao had already realized that directives from Moscow revealed little familiarity with t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Abbreviations
• Note on Transliteration
• Preface
• 1. Background: The Emancipation of the Chinese Communist Party from Moscow
• 2. Moscow’s Two-Faced Policy Toward China Between 1945 and 1948
• 3. 1949: The Pivotal Year on the Road to the Alliance
• 4. Stalin and Mao Zedong in Moscow: The Breakthrough to the Alliance
• 5. Conclusions and Prospects
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index