How did communism conquer China?

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Chinese Communist Party History

2:23How did a tiny band of guerrillas come to rule a quarter of humanity? And was the outcome of the Chinese Civil War really the heroic popular uprising that the People's Republic portrays? In this episode of the History Extra podcast, Danny Bird speaks to Frank Dakota about the surprising reality behind the rise of the Communist Party of China, from its marginal beginnings in the 1920s and the myth of the Long March

2:54to the decisive role of Stalin and the Soviet invasion of Manchuria in 1945. Together they explore how violence, propaganda and military conquest, rather than mass popular support, culminated in the raising of the red flag over the Forbidden City in 1949. A lot of people may have grown up with the impression that the Chinese Communist Party's rise was almost heroic and the expression of widespread popular will.

Researching Chinese Communism

3:20When you first started this project, what made you suspect that this story didn't quite add up? Well, I always suspected that the story didn't add up. And it started very much as an undergraduate student. We're talking 1980s. When I read a book called Red Star Over China by Edgar Snow. He was a naive journalist from Missouri, United States. He was invited by Mao Zedong and the Communist to join them and interview them.

3:51And of course, the book was enormously popular, translated into many languages and really put Mao and the Communist on the map. Now, you've got to remember one thing. In 1936, when Edgar Snow is invited by the communists, they represent roughly 40,000 people in a country of half a billion. In other words, the Chinese Communist Party is virtually non-existent. It doesn't amount to very much at all, with very little appeal. But that book really transforms the image of the communists

4:25into a sort of story of David and Goliath, with the sympathy going to the boy with the sling. The image is really a bunch of communists who are really devoted to the peasants and willing to fight for freedom, justice, equity up in the hills in a country which is marred by imperialism, peasant immiseration, fascist government, you name it,

4:58and Japanese, of course, attacks. So they are portrayed as the hope, and they liberate these social forces, which will somehow bring them all the way to 1949 and liberation when a quarter of humanity joins the socialist camp, the red flag goes up over the forbidden city in Beijing. That's the story. And I want to zone in on that a little bit more, because in your book, you very much focus on how small and precarious Chinese communism was in the 1920s,

5:28as you've just illustrated. But how marginal was the party early on,

Early Chinese Communism

5:32and why has that vulnerability been so downplayed in subsequent histories? Well, it's been downplayed for clear reasons. Once the red flag goes up in 1949, of course, history gets rewritten, and it gets rewritten in favor of the victors, the communists. But there is something else. We have been told this story, and it's been told so many times, that one is convinced somehow that there must be a reason why there was a social revolution in China before 1949.

6:06On the other hand, if we talk about Poland, or let's say East Germany, and you were to ask, why is it that East Germany became communist after 1945? Why is it that Poland became communist? You know, what are the reasons for the social revolution in East Germany? Of course, you would laugh and say, well, there weren't any conditions. There was no communism. Communism in Poland and the Communist Party were minute in the 1920s and 30s.

6:38And the reason they became communists is because the Red Army under Stalin invaded the country on their way to Berlin in 1945 and imposed communist parties. So the issue is that when it comes to China, we think in a very different manner. We think there must have been all sorts of reasons for the growth of the Communist Party. But in effect, it is the same reason. In 1945, a million soldiers under Stalin invade Manchuria, which is about the size of France and Great Britain combined. It's bigger than Japan.

7:08Then invade Manchuria, turn over that part to the north of Beijing, over to the communists, and help the communists become a formidable fighting machine. There were just a ragtag army of guerrilla fighters before that. So the key event is really 1945. So if you look at the 1920s and 30s, there's this huge literature about how the communists were established in 1921, how they got help from the common town, you name it. But in effect, the communists were no more important

7:40than in any European country, including Poland and East Germany, and including even Salazar in Portugal, who's a fascist in 1935, to be very precise, there were about one communist in Portugal for every 240, 280 people. In China, by the end of the 1930s, in 1940, it is one person for every 1,400 people, which is the exact same rough number,

8:13roughly the same number, as there are communist party members in the United States of America, which is not exactly seen to be at the forefront of the revolution. The reality is that the communists have very little appeal, are not important in terms of overall power, and would never have succeeded had it not been for Stalin and Manchuria in 1945.

Soviet Influence on China

8:40I want to come a little bit more onto that Soviet influence a little bit later on, but I wonder if for the benefit of listeners, if you could tell me a little bit more about the origins of the Chinese Communist Party and how that came about. Yes, of course. So the story generally goes as follows. 1917, Bolshevik revolution by Lenin. Soviet Union is established. It sends a message of great equity and freedom and liberation

9:11for all those who have been oppressed by a feudal system. This apparently has a great echo in China, and rapidly the Communist Party is established. But it's not quite like that. In fact, until 1919, very few people in China have any interest in communism. It is specifically a number of agents from the Comintern. The Comintern is short for Communist International, established by Lenin in 1919 to help promote revolution and overthrow capitalist governments

9:43around the world. These Bolshevik agents, Comintern agents, approach a small number of scholars in Beijing and manage to convert two. They send a Dutch man called Maring. Hank Snavely is his real name. And he's also a Comintern agent. And he puts together that Communist Party of China, which amounts to about 12 people in a room in Shanghai in 1921. By 1923, the communists in this country

10:15of 400 million people represent no more than about a couple of hundred. It is really nothing. So both Lenin and Hank Snavely realize these communists are not going anywhere. So on the other hand, there is another revolutionary party called the Nationalists under Sun Yat-San, and they are determined to reconquer that country that has become divided after the collapse of the empire in 1911 through the barrel of a gun.

10:45They want to build up an army and conquer it from the south. They are in Guangzhou, Canton, just across the border from Hong Kong today. They want to have an army and conquer all of the north in what they call a northern expedition. They need weapons. They need military advisors. They need finances. So Moscow says, we can give all of this to you if you accept Communist Party members in your ranks. That's exactly what happened. That's exactly, it's a Trojan horse.

11:16That northern expedition in 1926 begins moving up north to unify the country under the Nationalists and Sun Yat-San. Sun Yat-San is dead by now, but it's his party. Chiang Kai-shek is the man in charge. All along the way, the Communist Party members inside the ranks of the Nationalist Army create havoc, uprisings. They identify every single foreigner as an agent of imperialism. They attack

11:46wealthy shop owners, landowners. They create such havoc that there is a whole stream of refugees coming along the Yangtze from the inside, the hinterland in China, towards Shanghai. At one point in Nanjing, when it is seized by the Northern Army in March 1927, a dozen foreigners are killed, including the head of a university, the Japanese consular shot at twice. It creates a huge, massive international incident.

12:18Chiang Kai-shek, who is in charge of the Nationalists, decides that he no longer wants to have these communists inside the party ranks. There's a split. That's the end of the United Front. Now, we can move on like this for a bit of time, but to keep it short, from 1927 to roughly 1931, very little happens with the communists. They become basically a bunch of outsiders, outcasts, who really survive by attacking

12:49and plundering small towns deep inside the hinterland. They are not able to hang on to any kind of territory until they establish, under the orders of Stalin, with more help, a so-called Soviet, a territory, in very poor countryside, Jiangxi province, the side of France. They stay there for about three years. It collapses in 1934 for several reasons. First, they are surrounded by central government troops, but most of all, this is the magic word

13:20that so many historians have used, land reform. The idea is that the communists, by implementing land reform, take land from the rich and give it to the poor and generate a surplus on which they can thrive. But there are no landlords. There are no rich peasants where they are. All these villages are working very hard just to get by. And then the communists arrive and have to extract even more resources from these poor villages. So in the end,

13:50they ruin whatever economy they have to run. They pretty much reduce everyone to a state of starvation. As they say to themselves, they squeeze it like a lemon and then they must move on. In 1934, when they move on, they are about 80,000. It's the beginning of what is referred to as the Long March. And a year later, towards October 35, when they arrive, there are about six or 8,000 of them left. So a year later is when Edgar Snow visits these communists

14:21and writes his book Red Star over China. Violence runs through your account from the very beginning. How central would you say coercion was rather than popular support to the Chinese communist survival and expansion during this period? Well, there was extremely little popular support for the very reason that violence is the foundation of the revolution. Chairman Mao says it quite nicely, revolution is not a dinner party.

14:47But you've got to remember this entire country, of course, comes from a very violent background, not just the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911, but also, you know, subsequent military governors who fight each other for supremacy, alliances made, alliances destroyed. But the key point is that violence is seen by the communists as a means to achieve the revolution. It is not a byproduct. It's not like they want to sell the message and are then forced

15:18to resort to violence. I mean, Red Terror is the term they themselves use. So once they are on their own after 1927, when they split from the nationalist, which becomes the central government a year later, they are left to rove the countryside. And Chairman Mao is very good. He's a very poetic person comes up with great short sentences. Here's the one he gives. On the 5th of January 1930, a single spark

15:48will set the prairie alights. A single spark will set the prairie alight. Because in communist ideology, all these people are oppressed. So what you need to do is create a spark that will then somehow consume that country and lead to a revolution. So how do you create that spark? You must overthrow all the enemies of revolution in a violent act. So time and again, they try to ignite the spark by seizing

16:19a town, seizing a city, and then quite literally eliminating all those who stand for the central government, local officials, wealthy landowners, shopkeepers, they're either physically eliminated or ransomed, buildings that belong to the local government are burned down, and local men who are unemployed are recruited by the army. Sometimes it's forced conscription,

16:51sometimes it's voluntary. That's the way they operate. They believe that the resistance from these feudal, imperialist, capitalist forces is such that only brutal red terror can achieve that goal. You've got to remember the communists are not alone. Stalin means steal. Molotov is the greatest aid. Molotov means literally hammer. You must hammer the enemy ceaselessly. So violence is at the heart of the revolution.

17:21So a quick other point, the idea that you can somehow take land from the rich and give it to the poor is something that does work in Russia because you have a rich landed aristocracy with serfs who have only just been, I believe, in the 1860s. But there's no such thing in China. First, it's an extraordinarily complicated country. It's huge. It's the size of Europe. Conditions vary from place to place. But overall, the majority of villages own a very

17:52small plot of land. There's no big contrast between so-called landlords and serfs living in sheer misery. These conditions simply don't exist. You've mentioned him there, but I feel like we should address him. And that figure is Mao himself. Could you tell me a little bit about where he was at this period in China's history and how he came to communism itself? Mao ultimately is like so many other members of the Communist Party or

18:23members of the Nationalist Party. They are at heart nationalists. What they want is wealth and power for the country. Now, how to achieve it, the difference is in opinion there. but clearly Mao and the Communist are taken by a model proposed by Lenin in 1917. So Marx, of course, is the foundation. So Marx put it like

18:53this. The proletariat, the workers, are being exploited and one day they will rise and overthrow the capitalist class. That's the Marxist revolution. But Lenin, he makes a contribution to that. He says, we're not going to just wait for the proletariat to rise. We could wait for a very long time. So Lenin thinks we should have a party, a revolutionary party, that actually creates the revolution, that seizes power through violent means and then very much guides the revolution

19:25from above. So it's great faith in a very tightly organized party that seizes power. That's the model that Mao follows. Moscow loomens very large throughout this story and in those formative years, how independent was the Chinese Communist Party in reality and how decisive was Soviet money training and direction? It's absolutely fundamental. So here we have a number of issues and the biggest one is of course that people tend to bite the hand that feeds them.

19:55In other words, after 1949, when the People's Republic of China is proclaimed, of course they like to portray their own revolution as something which is quite intrinsic to Chinese communism and to the chairman himself. In other words, the entire past gets rewritten, the Soviet Union gets written out to some extent. They all accept that it was the Comintern that established the Chinese Communist Party in 1921. They accept that there was

20:26a united front in 1923 and that Moscow provided weapons and munitions and money to have a nice alliteration to the Nationalist Party. But what we don't always see so clearly is that time and again Stalin in particular intervenes. So we looked briefly at the history of the Communist Party in China up till 1936. for all intents and purposes they have

20:57been defeated by the central government. They have very little popular appeal. There are a bunch of about 40,000 rag-tag guerrilla fighters somewhere up in the north on extremely inhospitable terrain. They're in a country of half a billion by now, 1936, a country that is modernizing building roads, adhering to the highest standards of the League of Nations, very keen to join the modern world. One magistrate of a county out of two has a foreign degree. This is an extremely rapidly

21:28modernizing country. The communists are just bandits, really. So Stalin intervenes and Stalin says you must have a united front again with the central government, the nationalists. You must fight the Japanese. The Japanese took all of Manchuria in 1931 and are about to invade much larger parts of the country and finally the entire country after 1937. Stalin insists. Mao's very reluctant. He wants to fight Chiang Kai-shek his old enemy.

21:59He doesn't quite see that Japan is the one big threat. That's what ordinary people want too. They want to fight Japan. So finally, Mao's convinced, joins this united front which Chiang Kai-shek tolerates after an incident during which he's kidnapped. That's a long story. But the key point is time and again Stalin intervenes. So here's an other point. The standard history tells you how Mao from 1936 to roughly 42

22:29had to really manipulate, maneuver behind the scenes in order to get rid of the Chinese envoys sent by Moscow so that he could really impose a sort of signification of the Chinese Communist Party. that he could really make sure that it was adapted to the conditions of China. But nothing could be further from the truth. It is Stalin himself who sends a letter around about 3940

23:01to say, you know, these agents that we sent earlier, the very Chinese agents we sent, you should get rid of them. They're contaminated. There are purges going on under Stalin and some of these victims of course are linked to the earlier and voice sent to China. So it is Stalin who says you should trust Liu Shaoqi, you should trust Lin Biao, you should trust Judah. All the leadership that emerges at that point is very much handpicked by Stalin himself. And it goes

23:31much further. 1943, Stalin abolishes the common town. Why? He says all these local communist parties in Eastern Europe, in Asia, must adapt to their local conditions. Why does he do it? Because Stalingrad, the Germans are being defeated. Stalin can see the end of the Second World War. And he realizes that if those parties, communist parties established by the common town are to have any kind of

24:02credibility, they must look natural. They must look as if they came from the people themselves. So he says no one communist party can be the same. All of them have their own cultural background, their own social conditions, their own historical circumstances. So what I'm trying to say is when so many historians talk about how Mao is the one who signified Chinese communism,

24:33how Mao was the one who discovered the peasants, how Mao is the one who adapted communism to the specific conditions of China? My answer is absolutely not. That too was Stalin. And what does Stalin do in 1945? We talked about it earlier. He sends a million soldiers across the border from Siberia into Manchuria and holds on to Manchuria for about six months during which he hands over the countryside to

25:03Mao Zedong and his guerrilla fighters. and then massive military help, military academies established in 16 places in Manchuria, officers sent to Moscow for advanced training in strategy, weapons that arrived by the train load, and all along the Americans insist that the wartime ally, the central government under Chiang Kai-shek, insist that Chiang Kai-shek stop fighting the communists

25:33and enter a coalition. The Americans then imposed an arms embargo in September 1946, even as the Soviet Union is arming the communists to the teeth.

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The Long March

28:15I'd like to step back a little bit now to the 1930s, if we may, because I think one of the most potent myths of this period is what you've already referenced, the Long March. For the benefit of listeners, could you go into a little bit more detail, please? Yes, it's a fascinating episode. The name alone is extraordinary. Long March. And of course, the moment it's over, Mao writes about how the Long March