Transpacific Revolutionaries

The Chinese Revolution in Latin America

Matthew Rothwell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135135898
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Chinesische Geschichte

This book shows how Maoism was globalized during the 1949-1976 period, highlighting the agency of both Latin American and Chinese actors. While Maoism has long been known to have been influential in many social movements and guerrilla groups in Latin America, author Matthew Rothwell is the first to establish the way in which Latin American communists domesticated Maoism to Latin American conditions and turned Maoism into an influential political trend in many countries. By utilizing case studies of the formation of Maoist guerrilla groups and political parties in Mexico, Peru and Bolivia, the book shows how the movement of Chinese communist ideas to Latin America was the product of a highly organized effort that involved formal connections between Latin American activists and the People's Republic of China. It represents a major contribution to three developing fields of historical inquiry: Latin America in the Cold War, the global 1960s, and Chinese Maoist foreign relations.

1 China and Latin America

On May 8, in Chengchow, chairman Mao Tse-tung received friends from eight Latin American countries then visiting China.

At the reception, he first extended a warm welcome to the friends from Latin America and then spoke to them about the experiences of the Chinese people in revolutionary struggle and socialist construction. The friends from the eight Latin American countries gave him their impressions of China gained during their visit. They warmly praised the achievements of the Chinese people in their work, China’s general line for building socialism, the big leap forward and the people’s commune, as well as the contributions made by the Chinese people to world peace and the cause of human progress. They also talked about the historical ties and the ever-growing friendship between the peoples of Latin America and China. The Latin American people and the Chinese people, they said, have a common enemy—that is, U.S. imperialism. They spoke of the struggles waged by the peoples of Cuba and other Latin American countries against U.S. imperialism. They expressed the view that the Latin American people, with unity among themselves and unity with the Chinese people and the peoples of the rest of the world, could certainly win the final victory in the struggle against imperialism.

Chairman Mao Tse-tung thanked these friends for their friendship with the Chinese people. The Chinese people, he said, just like the Latin American people, had for long suffered from imperialist oppression and exploitation.¹

During the Maoist period, from 1949 to 1976, thousands of Latin Americans attended receptions in Beijing like the one recounted above. In the following chapters, we will consider case studies from Mexico, Peru and Bolivia. In each of those case studies, we will examine the activities of revolutionary activists and intellectuals who traveled to China and then sought to apply the lessons they learned from the Chinese revolutionary experience to their own Latin American countries. In order to follow the case study narratives in the chapters that follow, it will be helpful for the reader to have some information about the Chinese Revolution, the experience of socialist construction in China, and the international affairs of the People’s Republic of China, particularly in regard to Latin America. In this chapter, we will quickly summarize the history of the Chinese Revolution and discuss Maoist China’s foreign relations, including the Sino-Soviet split and the creation of Maoism as a trend within international communism. We will look closely at Maoist China’s foreign relations with Latin America, both in the traditional diplomatic and economic sense, and also in terms of party-to-party relations between the Chinese Communist Party and its Latin American counterparts.

The Chinese Revolution in a Nutshell

The Chinese Communist Party, which led the Chinese Revolution and came to power with the triumph of that revolution in 1949, was founded in 1921. Two major events contributed to the foundation of the Chinese Communist Party, one domestic and one foreign. The international event was the Russian Revolution of 1917. The domestic event was the May 4th movement, a nationalist political and cultural movement named after the 1919 day of protest in Beijing when students and other Chinese citizens protested the decision of the great powers meeting at Versailles to adjudicate the post–World War I world order to grant defeated Germany’s concessions in China to Japan.

Some students who mobilized as part of the May 4th movement formed a study circle around Beijing revolutionary intellectual Li Dazhao to study Marxism and to domesticate Marxism to Chinese conditions. Li interpreted Marxism in such a way that the rural Chinese peasantry might occupy the role of a revolutionary subject that Marx had not envisioned for peasants. The success of the Russian Revolution, and the betrayal of China by the liberal imperialist powers, motivated Li and his students to study Marxism. As Mao Zedong put it in 1949, “Before the October Revolution, the Chinese were not only ignorant of Lenin and Stalin, they did not even know of Marx and Engels. The salvoes of the October Revolution brought us Marxism-Leninism.”² But the example of the Russian Revolution was not enough. The Chinese Communist Party was formed in 1921 with the direct aid and intervention of several representatives of the Communist International (Comintern), including the Dutch communist Hendrikus Sneevliet, who presided over the founding congress of the Chinese party.

During their early years, the Chinese communists allied with the Nationalist Party (often known by its Chinese name, Guomindang) to end warlord rule in southern China. In 1927, the Guomindang launched a surprise purge of communists which led to an extended period of civil war, as the Chinese communists, led by Mao Zedong, formulated a strategy of carving out rural base areas initially for survival and then as havens from which they could both attempt to extend the revolution and model policies and social relations that they would later try to extend to all of China. The most famous of these base areas, Yan’an, was founded in northern China after the communists were forced to make a year-long strategic retreat, known as the Long March, from southern China beginning in October 1934.

Mao established his absolute leadership of the Communist Party during the Long March. While he had been a founding member of the party and had led the establishment of the communists’ largest base area, he had not previously always prevailed in internal policy debates. His ideological opponents often derived authority from Moscow. In 1930, the Communist International dispatched a group of inexperienced and dogmatic young Chinese communists who had been trained in Russia to lead the Chinese party. These “returned Bolsheviks” maintained close contact with Moscow, and their policies sharply diverged from Mao’s (suspiciously, an obituary for Mao ran in a Comintern journal in 1930). As repression in the cities forced party leaders to relocate to the rural base area that Mao had established, they removed him from the leadership of the base area. Some sources even indicate that Mao was held under house arrest during 1934 because of his disagreements with the recently relocated party leaders. A German agent of the Comintern, Otto Braun, led the Chinese party from 1933 to 1935, when Mao displaced him and firmly established his own leadership during the Long March.³

Japanese aggression against China mounted during the 1930s, culminating in a full-scale invasion in 1937. In response, the communists and the nationalists allied once more. During this time, called the period of the Second United Front, the communists moderated their earlier policies of class struggle and united many progressives under their banner, as well as rural people from all class backgrounds who opposed the Japanese invasion in the northern areas where the communists had their strongest support bases. Many patriotic young Chinese migrated to Yan’an, which they saw as the center of the most effective and principled resistance to the Japanese invasion.

The communists and nationalists fought a final civil war after World War II. By 1949, the communists had achieved a clear military victory across the country, leaving only Taiwan and a few small off-shore islands in the hands of the nationalists. The new People’s Republic of China (PRC) soon signed a mutual defense treaty with the Soviet Union and began to receive copious amount of Soviet aid. The United States backed the nationalists in Taiwan and resisted giving a seat in the United Nations to the PRC until 1971. Mao laid out what he considered fundamental principles for Chinese foreign policy in the post-victory period as early as 1945. At the Seventh Congress of the CCP, he stated that “when you are making revolution, you need foreign aid; after you have achieved victory, you ought to support foreign revolution.”⁴

Chinese Foreign Relations, 1949–1956

Mao’s belief in the need for socialist states to support revolutions abroad characterized the foreign policy of the newborn People’s Republic. The dangers of this policy were also quickly revealed, as military engagement with the United States held the threat of nuclear war and military defeat. In any case, military support for revolution abroad proved expensive for a Chinese economy that was only now recovering from decades of occupation and civil war. The tension between supporting revolution abroad and building socialism at home manifested itself in a sometimes contradictory foreign policy, with China emphasizing world revolution at some points and peaceful coexistence at others. These divisions reflected broader divisions between revolutionaries and moderates within the Chinese Communist Party. Moderate figures, such as the skillful diplomat Zhou Enlai, were associated with the peaceful coexistence line, while more radical figures such as Lin Biao were associated with the line of spreading world revolution.

In his November 16, 1949, speech at the opening proceedings of the Union Conference of the Countries of Asia and Australasia held by the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) in Beijing, Liu Shaoqi promoted the Chinese Revolution as a model that revolutionaries across the developing world should emulate when he stated that “the path taken by the Chinese people in defeating imperialism and its lackeys and in founding the People’s Republic of China is the path that should be taken by the peoples of the various colonial and semicolonial countries in their fight for national independence and people’s democracy.”⁵ As we will see at the beginning of Chapter 2, when we examine the experience of the leading Mexican Marxist and labor organizer Vicente Lombardo Toledano, the Chinese Communists played an active role at the WFTU conference in determining in what particular ways the Chinese Revolution could serve as a model for revolutionaries in other parts of the world.⁶

In addition to setting themselves up as revolutionary teachers for other Third World revolutionaries, the Chinese Communists took an active military role in advancing revolution in their immediate neighborhood when they intervened to save the North Korean armed forces from being defeated by the United States. The Chinese were tied down in the Korean Peninsula from November 1950 until July 1953. Although the Chinese and Soviets had signed a treated of “friendship, alliance and mutual assistance”⁷ in February 1950, the burden of the fighting and much of the cost of the war fell on the shoulders of the Chinese. Fear of renewed warfare with the United States and a desire to refocus the country’s energies and resources on the task of economic development, concentrated in the First Five-Year Plan, which the Chinese began in 1953, led China to reevaluate its aggressive international posture.

At the 1954 Geneva Conference on the war in Indochina, the Chinese pressured Ho Chi Minh and the leadership of the Vietnamese Workers’ Party to accept a peace agreement rather than push for nationwide victory after they defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu. Although Mao would later criticize himself for this decision, at the time the Chinese were anxious to avoid being drawn into another conflict as had happened with the Korean War.⁸ In 1954, the Chinese communists also urged the Malayan Communist Party to leave off their armed struggle and switch to peaceful and democratic tactics.⁹ At the same time, the People’s Republic sought warmer relations with noncommunist neighboring countries, such as U Nu’s Burma and Thailand. As part of this diplomatic initiative, China’s leaders pledged not to support communists in Thailand and Burma.¹⁰

This diplomatic effort at promoting “peaceful coexistence” with established capitalist governments rather than promoting socialist revolution in capitalist countries reached its climax at the Bandung conference in 1955. Zhou Enlai played a prominent role in Bandung, promoting the idea of peaceful coexistence with the goal of winning African and Asian nations to the idea of establishing equitable relations with each other and not supporting the United States in its containment of China and its Cold War against the Soviet Union. Peaceful coexistence was shorthand for the Five Principles of Coexistence: mutual respect for territorial sovereignty, mutual nonaggression, mutual nonintervention in internal affairs, equality and mutual benefit, and peaceful coexistence.¹¹ Clearly, to the degree that China had genuinely recentered its foreign policy around the idea of peaceful coexistence, it had come a long way from promoting revolution abroad. An observer in 1955 might reasonably have thought that the Korean conflict had tamed China’s revolutionary ardor and that the People’s Republic had settled the contradiction between promoting its own peaceful development and supporting world revolution firmly on the side of peaceful development. With the beginning of the Sino-Soviet split and the Great Leap Forward, however, things would change again.

The Sino-Soviet Split and the Creation of Maoism as an International Political Trend

After midnight on February 25, 1956, Nikita Khrushchev summoned the delegates of the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to a surprise session where he criticized many of Stalin’s errors and crimes. This secret speech¹² began a process of de-Stalinization in the Soviet Union, during which many of Stalin’s repressive policies were reversed or at least relaxed. Khrushchev criticized the mass political repression that characterized periods of Stalin’s rule, as well as Stalin’s cult of personality and the arbitrary nature of Soviet justice during periods of political terror and mass mobilization. Khrushchev blamed Stalin for Yugoslavia’s estrangement from the Soviet bloc and criticized Stalin’s domineering approach to dealing with fraternal communist parties. Khrushchev also put forward the ideas of “peaceful co-existence” and “peaceful competition” between the socialist and capitalist worlds, in contrast to previous communist doctrine that socialism could only triumph through violent revolutions and warfare with the capitalist world.¹³

One might expect the Chinese reaction to Khrushchev’s speech to have been favorable. After all, the Chinese Communist Party had repeatedly suffered from Stalin’s interference both during the armed phase of the revolution and during the early years of socialist construction. Indeed, Khrushchev revealed the identities of all the Chinese KGB agents operating in China as an early act of atonement for Stalin’s treatment of the Chinese party.¹⁴ While the Chinese communists welcomed the admission that the Soviet Union had mistreated its weaker allies, because of domestic political concerns, the initial Chinese reaction was mainly negative. Faced with an economic crisis caused by adopting the then-current Soviet economic model, which emphasized industrial development at the expense of agriculture, in 1955 the Chinese communists instituted a series of agricultural policies that emphasized mass mobilization for the collectivization of agriculture in the hopes that the agricultural sector of the economy could catch up with the projected needs of industry. This move by the Chinese was not only a break with the current Soviet orthodoxy, championed by Khrushchev, but also reminiscent of the mass mobilizations for agricultural collectivization and rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union during the late 1920s and 1930s. As in the earlier Soviet experience, the Chinese combined high-minded appeals with substantial coercive force and a ramped up cult of personality. Just as the Soviet Union was moving to de-Stalinize, the Chinese communists, led by Mao Zedong, rejected the new Soviet policies in favor of the revolutionary, heroic tradition of the early Stalin years.¹⁵ De-Stalinization in the Soviet Union was a direct threat to the policies of China’s leaders.

In early April 1956, the Chinese communists published “On the Historical Experience of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat,” their first response to Khrushchev’s speech. In this article,¹⁶ the Chinese communists put forward a summation of Stalin’s years of leadership that was much more positive than Khrushchev’s evaluation. The authors of the article, a writing committee working under Mao’s supervision, stated that “some people consider that Stalin was wrong in everything; this is a grave misconception. Stalin was a great Marxist-Leninist, yet at the same time a Marxist-Leninist who committed several gross errors without realizing that they were errors.”¹⁷ The Chinese recognized that Stalin had committed errors, but the attitude of “On the Historical Experience of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat” was in line with Mao’s summation of Stalin, that “we maintain the estimate of 30 per cent for his mistakes and 70 per cent for his achievements.”¹⁸

After the revolts against Soviet-dominated regimes in Poland and Hungary later in 1956, the threat of de-Stalinization became more urgent to the Chinese. In late December, the CCP published “More On the Historical Experience of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.”¹⁹ The new article was more sharply worded than the eponymous April article and indicated that the Chinese leadership felt that de-Stalinization was a serious error that threatened the stability of the soc...