As Lenin had also noted, in relation to the KMT,
“What is this party’s weakness? It lies in the fact that it has not yet been able sufficiently to involve broad masses of the Chinese people in the revolution. The proletariat in China is still very weak—there is therefore no leading class capable of waging a resolute and conscious struggle to carry the democratic revolution to its end. The peasantry, lacking a leader in the person of the proletariat, is terribly downtrodden, passive, ignorant and indifferent to politics. Despite the revolutionary overthrow of the old and thoroughly corrupt monarchy, despite the victory of the republic, China has no universal suffrage! The elections to Parliament had a qualification: only those who had property valued at about 500 roubles were entitled to vote! This also shows how little of the really broad popular mass has yet been drawn into active support of the Chinese Republic. But without such massive support, without an organised and steadfast leading class, the Republic cannot be stable.”
Contrary to today's pro-imperialist-“socialists”, of the type of the USC, that look to democratic imperialism/NATO to defend and promote the interests of workers, Lenin, in the same piece, notes the alliance between European imperialism, and the Chinese government of Yuan Shikai.
“The early clashes have so far ended in a victory for Yuan Shih-k’ai: he has united all the “moderate” (i.e., reactionary) parties, split off a section of the “Nationalists”, got his man to fill the post of President of the Lower Chamber of Parliament, and contrary to the Will of Parliament, secured a loan from “Europe”, i.e., Europe’s swindling billionaires. The terms of the loan are hard, downright usurious, with the salt gabelle as security. The loan will put China in pawn to the most reactionary and plunderous European bourgeoisie, which is prepared to stamp out the freedom of any nation once profits are involved. The European capitalists will reap tremendous profits on this loan of almost 250 million roubles.”
A look at the recent London conference on Ukraine, discussing how the country's resources can be devoured by western companies, and its cowed labour movement that has collapsed at the feet of Zelensky's anti-working-class regime, can be exploited, gives an up to date equivalent.
The problem for the KMT, as identified by Lenin and Trotsky, was that it did not have this mass popular support that the SR's had, amongst the peasantry. It was a bourgeois party, but the bourgeoisie, itself, is a small class, compared to the peasantry/petty-bourgeoisie, and proletariat. To achieve its ends, it must either ally with these other classes, or, else, must be able to wield significant military power. If it relies on the latter, it must be necessarily authoritarian and unstable. In the bourgeois revolutions of the 18th and early 19th century, the bourgeoisie – itself relatively larger in size, prior to the process of concentration and centralisation of capital – could ally with the petty-bourgeoisie, peasantry and nascent proletariat, on the basis of shared political objectives. But, even by 1848, the proletariat, though only of sufficient size in Britain, had grown significantly, so that its own, distinct, revolutionary class interests, had to be considered.
The conditions in which, in China, the masses of the proletariat, poor peasants, and urban petty-bourgeoisie all looked to the Chinese Communist Party for leadership and solutions, should have put that party, and the Comintern in a prime position. Instead, Stalin, and the Comintern looked to the phantom of the KMT, and subordinated the Chinese workers and poor peasants to it. It was the same thing that they were to do a decade later, when, in order to retain an alliance with the phantom of the Spanish bourgeoisie, against fascism, they subordinated Spanish workers to the Popular Front. In that case, they allied with Spanish liberal politicians, on the basis that they represented the Spanish bourgeoisie, although the reality was that the Spanish bourgeoisie had already thrown its support behind Franco, and those liberals represented nothing, and depended on the Popular Front for their survival.
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