The Chinese Revolution and The Theses of Comrade Stalin
I am working from the 1967, Ann Arbour Edition of Trotsky's Problems of The Chinese Revolution. All page numbers are taken from that.
The first Chinese Revolution had taken place in 1911, under the petty-bourgeois, nationalist leadership of Sun Yat Sen. But, Sun Yat Sen never had political power, and, like with every other petty-bourgeois nationalist movement, that power was, instead, manifest in the form of Bonapartism, resting upon organised military force. To quote Mao Zedong, "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun." That, of course, as Marx and Engels describe, in “Anti-Duhring”, is the typical approach of the petty-bourgeois, and not the Marxist.
Political power fell to Yuan Shikai who did wield that military power. Like other such Bonapartists, this political power, resting on a brittle military power, in order to hold together antagonistic social forces, was likely to shatter, and did so, with Shikai's death, in 1916. The Beiyang Government, based in Beijing, was internationally recognised as the government of China, but, for the reasons described, in the previous section, was a mirage, as China, like other examples of neo-colonialism, was not only fragmented into different regions, in which competing imperialist powers held sway, but also where competing Chinese warlords, connected to those imperialist powers, exercised control. A look at Libya, after 2011, provides a similar picture. The task of the bourgeois-national revolution had not been completed by the 1911 revolution, and lay ahead for a second revolution.
The prelude to this second revolution, comes with the return of Sun Yat Sen, from Japan, in 1916, the establishment of the KMT government in Canton, and with Sun's alliance between this government and the Chinese Communist Party/Comintern, against the militarists and the Beiyang Government. Lenin had immediately, realised the petty-bourgeois, utopian nature of Sun Yat Senism, as far back as 1912, noting its obvious identity with Russian Narodism, with which Lenin had done battle over the previous 20 years. The Narodniks, were a petty-bourgeois movement, based upon the peasants and independent commodity producers. As such, they sought an end to Tsarism, but also, as with Sismondi, and other such petty-bourgeois ideologies, also wanted to hold back Russia's capitalist development, i.e. they represented reactionary, petty-bourgeois, “anti-capitalism”. They saw capitalist development as a diversion from some natural path for Russia, being imposed on it from without, and with the help of a Russian state, and intelligentsia that had, somehow, become confused, and needed to be set back on the correct, Russian nationalist, exceptionalist path. It is the same petty-bourgeois nationalist sentiment that lay behind Brexit etc. The Narodniks morphed into the Social Revolutionaries.
As Trotsky notes, this represents a significant difference between Russia and China. The Russian peasants and petty-bourgeoisie developed their own political party, in the SR's, and it was that which formed the basis of the idea of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat Leading the Peasantry, as the Russian workers were able to provide the leadership in the Russian bourgeois-democratic revolution, subsumed within the proletarian revolution, via Permanent Revolution. But, the Chinese peasants never created such a party. The Chinese peasants and petty-bourgeoisie, as well as the Chinese workers, instead, simply aligned themselves with the Chinese Communist Party. The KMT, was simply the party of the Chinese bourgeoisie, and representing its class interests.
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