Chapter VI
THE COMMUNIST AND MINOR PARTIES
The party politics of Republican China fall into two periods: the early period of competitive, pre-parliamentary parties, 1912 to the Great Revolution; and a later period of struggling monopoly-power parties, from the Great Revolution to the present. In the earlier period the Kuomintang and its rivals tolerated one another's existence; each regarded co-existing parties as natural, desirable, and useful. But the sham democracy of the prostituted Republic disheartened the Kuomintang, which thereupon bid for the complete conquest of power, brooking no legitimate competitors; its rivals did likewise. The first coalition (1922-27) of Kuomintang and Communists was therefore not the democratic competition of two parties with different stresses upon a common ideological foundation, but a war-time alliance of basically incompatible forces. After the 1927 break, the Kuomintang became the only legal party in most of the country, while the Communists—with a rebel army, an unrecognized government, and a territory of their own—enjoyed legality within the limits of their own swords. The Kuomintang, embraced by all major groups save the Communists, became the foremost vehicle for Chinese political life. Minor parties enjoyed precarious, ineffectual existences, underground or expatriate.
With the outbreak of war in 1937, Nationalists and Communists adopted a truce, formally a Communist surrender of armed rebellion, subversive ideology, and separate government. In actuality it was an alliance of deadly enemies against the Japan which threatened them both. Today, Chinese party politics revives in the People's Political Council, and to a slight degree in public opinion. The legal prohibition of minor parties, including the Communists, remains in effect. Chinese party politics, in the Western sense of a friendly subdivision of common opinion, remains vestigial. The only guarantee of party rights is an unstable toleration extended by the Kuomintang in the negative form of non-prosecution. The Kuomintang is the Party for most of China. The Communist Party is the party for a separate fraction of China. The minor parties, holding neither territory nor armies in the game of power, maneuver between and about the two, struggling to attain legal existence.
The Chinese Communists: Party and Leaders
Literary Marxism runs back to the Ch'ing dynasty, but the first formal organization of a Chinese Communist Party occurred with the first Congress of the Chinese C.P., in Shanghai, during July of 1921.[1] The Soviet-Kuomintang entente was, strictly speaking, not a union between the Kuomintang and the Communist parties, although it came to be such in fact; it was collaboration between the Third International, which agreed that Communism was unsuited to China, and the Kuomintang. The development of a Chinese Communist Party, and open Communist debate concerning the assumption of power, made the Kuomintang mistrustful, repressive, and finally hostile. The suppression of the Communists by Chiang in 1927 has become world history; Vincent Sheean and André Malraux have preserved aspects of it in moving literature.[2]
In the period 1927-37 the Chinese Communists operated the Chinese Soviet Republic (Chung-hua Su-wei-ai Kung-ho-kuo),[3] primarily in Kiangsi, but also in the Ao-yü-wan (Hupeh, Honan, Anhui) area. In the Long March of 1934-35 the main forces of the Communists, in the most spectacular military move in China since the great Northern raid of the T'aip'ing, marched a distance of some six thousand miles, and established their new area in North Shensi (see above, p. [112] ff.). Not only did the Chinese Red Army remain intact; through great and successful effort, the Communists transplanted schools, banks, and other institutions intact. The Long March was comparable to the celebrated Flight of the Tartars, in that it amounted to the transplanting of an entire people, their worldly goods, and their most highly treasured institutions and traditions.
Despite Kuomintang theory, the Frontier Area is a one-party imperium in imperio, and its unchallenged party is the Communist. Under conditions requiring great fortitude, the Chinese Communist leaders have consolidated power, and use their base to spread Marxism through the guerrilla movement. They are thus in the best possible political position; their strategic excellence makes them welcome in precisely those zones wherein their doctrines can best take effect. Their party organization controls the Frontier Area through formal appointment of the leading officials by the National Military Affairs Commission, and through formulae of election for the subordinate officials.
The hierarchy of the Chinese C.P. is much like that of the Kuomintang, which also copied Soviet models:[4]