At the time of the events of 1925-7, in China, Trotsky and the Left Opposition (1923), were in a bloc with the centrist opposition of Zinoviev and Kamenev (1925), as a United Opposition. The public positions of this United Opposition were compromised by the fact that the 1923 Opposition opposed the entry of the Chinese Communist Party into the Kuomintang, but were outvoted, within it, by the 1925 Opposition that had returned to the position adopted by Zinoviev and Kamenev, along with Stalin, in February 1917, of support for a Menshevik stages theory, in which first a bourgeois-democratic/national revolution must be supported, manifest in a democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry, followed, some time later, after society has passed through a period of bourgeois parliamentarism, by a proletarian revolution.
Trotsky had set this out, in a letter to Max Shachtman, on December 10th. 1930, in which Trotsky noted that, when it came to voting in the Politburo, he had always, from as far back as 1923, voted against entry into the Kuomintang, and against the entry of the KMT into the Comintern, and so on. Given the conditions of the time, it was a tactical question of whether to avoid a split in the United Opposition, and the majority of the 1923 Opposition decided to avoid it, and Trotsky complied, in relation to his public statements. With the benefit of hindsight, he notes, he was wrong to have agreed to this formal acceptance too.
But, it was not that the events in China were an isolated incident, as previously set out. In 1923, in the German Revolution, similar wrong positions were adopted, failing to promote the creation of soviets when they were required, and then administratively seeking to create them, when the revolutionary wave had ebbed, demanding General Strikes, when the conditions for them did not exist and so on, which would then inevitably fail. In Britain, the Stalinist diplomatic manoeuvres led to the creation of the Anglo-Russian Committee, which gave left cover to the pro-imperialist leaders of the TUC, as they prepared to betray the General Strike.
The consequence of the defeat of the 1925-7 revolution, in China, confirmed Trotsky's prognosis and analysis. With the benefit of hindsight, its possible to argue Trotsky should have forced a split with the Zinovievists, as Lenin had done in April 1917, rather than compromise with their centrist positions. But, an exploration of alternative histories, based on “what-ifs”, is a pointless exercise. However, Trotsky learned from that experience, when it came to the Spanish Revolution, and the mistakes made by the centrists of the POUM and CNT, in joining the Popular Front government, and what were, now, the open betrayals carried out by the Stalinists.
The fact that Trotsky's writings in this period of the United opposition are not as sharp as they might have been, in relation to opposition to entering the KMT, has to be judged in this context. Also to be taken into consideration, in considering his opposition to entering the KMT, as against the position of Marx and Engels in joining the German Democrats, or Trotsky's French Turn, in 1934, is the fact that, in 1848, Marx and Engels supporters were a small minority, which, as Engels said, needed to get the ear of the German workers, who still looked to the Democrats. Similarly, the Trotskyists, in France, in 1934, represented a small minority, whilst French workers still looked to the Socialists. As Trotsky pointed out, the Marxist position is the independent organisation of the working-class, and its party, but, in these instances, no such party existed, only its nuclei or embryo, and the point was to build it.
But, that was not the case, in China. Not only did a global communist movement exist, as well as the USSR, on China's doorstep, but the Chinese Communist Party, itself, comprised more than 100,000 workers, many of whom were also armed. The need and the ability to preserve the independence of the workers, and their party, was, then, clear, but the Stalinists drove them into the arms of the national bourgeoisie, and the KMT of Chiang Kai Shek, as well as inviting the KMT into the Comintern. That despite the fact that, in 1926, Chiang Kai Shek had already shown his hand by organising a coup, in Canton.
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