Managing Transitions

The Chinese Communist Party, United Front Work, Corporatism and Hegemony

Gerry Groot

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135952921
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Managing Transitions examines the history and roles of China's minor parties and groups (MPG's) in the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) united front between the 1930's and 1990's using Antonio Gramsci's principles for the winning and maintaining of hegemony. Gramsci advocated a "war of position," the building of political alliances to isolate existing state powers and win consent for revolutionary rule and transform society. Economic reform is now creating new socio-economic groups and the CCP is adjusting the united front and the MPGs to co-opt their representatives and deliberately forestall the evolution of an autonomous civil society and middle class which could challenge CCP rule. This has resulted in a new and expanding role for the united front, the MPGs and organisations representing the new interest groups.

Chapter 1

China’s Minor Parties and Groups: 1930–1945

IN 1937, AS A DIRECT RESULT OF CHINA’S INVASION BY JAPAN, CHINA’S Guomindang government established the Supreme National Defense Advisory Council symbolizing an unprecedented degree of inclusion and political unity for a formerly one party state. In March 1938, this council declared that a “People’s Political Council shall be set up for the people to participate in the affairs of state, thereby unifying the national strength and collecting the best minds and views for facilitating the formulation and execution of national policies.”¹ The resultant People’s Political Council (PPC) and greater freedoms of speech, assembly and association, marked a dramatic revival of the possibility of Chinese democracy.² It was also a chance for the GMD to win over critics.

The GMD in the Early 1930s

In the 1930s, the Guomindang was a largely military party lacking an organic basis. Its huge nominal membership did not equal great political strength.³ It did not even represent particular classes, such as rural landlords and urban bourgeoisie, although their interests sometimes coincided.⁴ Rather than serving business, the GMD was antagonistic towards it.⁵ Its forerunner, Sun Yatsen’s Tongmenghui, took funds from business but never included it. Moreover, Sun had extorted funds from Guangzhou businesses.⁶ In 1927, some Shanghai businessmen funded the Guomindang and Green Gang criminals to massacre troublesome trade unionists and suspected communists. The GMD leader, Generalissimo Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek) received money on condition that he break the GMD-CCP alliance (the “First United Front”) in existence since 1924. However, these funds were insufficient and to raise more, the Guomindang and GreenGang simply kidnapped and blackmailed Shanghai businessmen,⁷ actions that failed to increase GMD legitimacy.

The Nationalists were also strife-ridden. Disaffected leaders often aligned with warlords, exacerbating rampant factionalism and regionalism.⁸ The years 1930–31 were particularly bad for party and national unity. There was fighting in North China and an Anti-Jiang “Northern Coalition” of warlords proclaimed a popular “Provisional Constitution.” In early 1931, Jiang placed the GMD’s elder statesman, Hu Hanmin, under house arrest.⁹ Worst of all, on September 18, 1931, North China was attacked by Japan. By January 1932 Japanese troops were outside Shanghai and independent papers like Shi Liangcai’s Shenbao (Shanghai daily), attacked Jiang’s policies of appeasement and called for a “last-ditch war of national defense.”¹⁰ Shi and prominent educators, Huang Yanpei and Tao Xingzhi, used Shenbao to pressure the GMD into active resistance. On September 26, 1931, some 200,000 Shanghainese assembled to demand that the Guomindang defend Manchuria.¹¹

The Guomindang needed to win more support. Its first concession was the Provisional Constitution for the Period of Political Tutelage of June 1931. A half step towards fulfilling longstanding demands for constitutional government, this constitution neither legitimized opposition nor legalized political parties. In late-1931, the GMD was forced to call a National Emergency Conference for April 1932 while the famous educator, Cai Yuanpei, was declaring that many able men were being excluded from both the GMD and government.¹² Shenbao’s subsequent calls to boycott the Conference resulted in only one third of delegates attending.¹³ Even these delegates demanded a people’s assembly. In response, the Guomindang proposed the gradual creation of popularly elected advisory councils in accord with its concept of a long tutelage in preparation for full democracy.¹⁴ Democratization then abated.

By 1935 to 1936 another crisis was imminent as Japan’s aggression increased. In response, activists formed the All China National Salvation Association (NSA) in May 1936. Local National Salvation Associations (Jiu guo hui) had begun forming in late-1931 to call for an end to the GMD-CCP civil war and a united front against Japan but the formation of the NSA was a major event. However, Jiang concluded that the Association’s left-wing leadership, its support for a GMD-CCP alliance, and its call for a united front of all groups against Japan, meant that the NSA was a CCP front. Accordingly, the GMD arrested the Association’s “Seven Gentlemen” activists: Shen Junru, Zou Taofen, Zhang Naiqi, Sha Qianli, Li Gongpu, Wang Zaoshi, and Mme Shi Liang. Others, the radical Song Qingling, He Xiangning and Tao Xingzhi, escaped arrest, the first two almost certainly because of the respect accorded to them as widows of GMD leaders (Song as Sun Yatsen’s wife and He as the wife of the assassinated Liao Zhongkai). Their social status and connections provided a unique protection that allowed them to organize and speak out publicly.

Contrary to Jiang’s expectations, the arrests strengthened the NSA’s popular support. The GMD was arresting patriots defending China from foreign aggression. Even Jiang ally and Green Gang leader, Du Yuesheng, as well as many prominent Shanghai capitalists, visited the captives.¹⁵ Support for the NSA was such that it eventually became China’s third largest party.¹⁶ Even important GMD factions wanted to fight Japan while Song Ziwen (T.V.Soong) passed funds to support the Salvationists through his sister, Song Qingling.¹⁷

For his part, Jiang Jieshi, while seeking to destroy the communists, nevertheless began in late-1935 to hold secret negotiations on establishing a united front with both the CCP and the Soviet Union.¹⁸ He also organized what was intended to be the final anti-communist push. However, in the Xi’an Incident of December 1936, those responsible for carrying out this campaign, generals Zhang Xueliang and Yang Hucheng, held Jiang hostage, demanding he join with the CCP to fight Japan.

The generals’ move reflected overwhelming popular pressure for an anti-Japanese alliance from Salvationists, GMD factions, minor political groups, the press, and the Soviet Union. Following his release, Jiang therefore did establish an alliance with the CCP. This second period of GMD-CCP cooperation (Di er ci Guo-Gong hezuo) officially began several months after the outbreak of full-scale war with Japan on July 7, 1937. To build popular support, the GMD also legalized all political groups and created a People’s Political Council.

The Legalization of the MPGs

The Defense Advisory Council which brought the People’s Political Council into being had itself been created to advise the Nationalist government and ministers had used it to air ideas and seek the counsel.¹⁹ In a major expansion of representation, the Council had included some MPG members and CCP representatives. The National Socialist Party (Zhongguo guojia shehui dang NSP)²⁰ and the China Youth Party (Zhongguo qingnian dang, aka La Jeunesse (CYP)) were the first minor parties given official representative status.²¹ Although a major advance, representation of non-GMD voices was limited and Council members agitated to have it expanded.²²

This agitation and the increasing danger facing the GMD resulted in the creation of the far more formal and authoritative Peoples Political Council in which representation of non-GMD voices was much broader. Its two hundred members were divided into four categories: eighty-eight elected from the twenty-eight provinces, sixteen from Mongolia and Tibet, six Overseas Chinese, and one hundred individual members (MPG members or so-called non-party personages (NPPs)). Significantly, until 1941 the GMD chose suitable political, economic, cultural and educational representatives regardless of political leanings.²³ The CCP was allocated seven seats in the first PPC but the majority were GMD representatives.

The PPC was an advisory, not a policy making body that collected views for the “facilitation and execution” of policy, to hear government reports and interpolate ministers.²⁴ The Second PPC had additional powers of investigation and women’s representation increased to fifteen delegates, but there was no increase in its power.²⁵ However, the PPC did symbolize national unity by representing all of China’s major political groups. Delegates could comment on government, support the war effort and express concerns and criticisms. Government ministers were exposed to unprecedented public scrutiny and much of the GMD’s resultant displeasure was directed at the MPGs and NPPs as its foremost critics. The Conference became a key forum through which all sides to attempted to influence the public and mobilizing them behind the war effort.

The PPC was not a parliament but effectively an inclusive corporatist body in which the MPGs were the legitimate representatives of China’s intelligentsia. This form was probably coincidental but in the 1920s influential GMD theorists, such as Dai Jitao, had been philosophically inclined towards corporatism as a means of class reconciliation,²⁶ while Jiang Jieshi was enthusiastic about fascism, an inherently corporatist ideology.²⁷ Moreover, the GMD had already organized corporatist associations for businessmen²⁸ and even Du Yuesheng and his Green Gang have been described as having been “corporatized” after Du was given official status and later even named to the National Assembly.²⁹

The Six Minor Parties and Groups in the PPC

There were six MPGs represented in the PPC: The China Youth Party, the National Socialist Party, the National Salvation Association, The Third Party, the Vocational Education Society and the Rural Reconstruction Association. These groups were not necessarily fixed and distinct but could be described in terms of alignment with any one of the four parties (si dang) and four factions (si pai).³⁰

The China Youth Party

An outgrowth of the China Youth Association founded by Zeng Qi and others in 1918, the right-wing CYP was formed by students who studied in France after 1918. Sichuanese in origin, its leaders, Wang Guangqi, Li Huang, Chen Yusheng, and Zhou Taixuan, were part of the New Culture Movement. Other members included future CCP luminaries such as Li Dazhao, Mao Zedong, Zhou Fohai, Qi Tian, and Tian Han.³¹ In 1923, during protests in France against foreign attempts to control China’s railways, the Association allied itself with other Chinese groups, including the communists. The souring of this alliance and the subsequent formation of the China Youth Party in December 1923 was strongly influenced by Zeng Qi’s dislike of communists and of Zhou Enlai in particular.³²

The CYP was strongly nationalist and anti-communist and had criticized GMD-CCP cooperation between 1924 and 1927. Accused of being fascist and having warlord connections, the CYP went underground between 1923 and 1929, its only public face being a youth league.³³ Its platform called for mass mobilization, control of public opinion, and the use of violence against communists and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Glossary of Commonly Used Acronyms
• Preface
• Introduction. United Fronts, Hegemony, Corporatism, and China’s Minor Parties and Groups
• Chapter 1. China’s Minor Parties and Groups: 1930–1945
• Chapter 2. Winning Hegemony: The MPGs, the GMD, and the United Front, 1945–1948
• Chapter 3. Cooperation with the CCP: 1948–1949
• Chapter 4. Toward Socialism: 1949–1955
• Chapter 5. From “Blooming and Contending” to the Anti-Rightist Campaign: 1956–1957
• Chapter 6. From the Second Hundred Flowers to the Cultural Revolution: 1957–1966
• Chapter 7. Hibernation and Revival: 1966–1981
• Chapter 8. Re-building for the New Era: 1981–1986
• Chapter 9. Zhao Ziyang, Political Reform, and the United Front: 1986–1989
• Chapter 10. The Events of April–June 1989
• Chapter 11. Expansion of the United Front: 1989 to Mid-1990s
• Conclusion. The End of the MPGs?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index