To understand these events in China, it is also necessary to understand the wider events of the time. Lenin had withdrawn from active politics in 1923, following the deterioration in his health. It opened the door to the factional struggle inside the Russian Communist Party, which, itself, reflected the wider social changes, and conditions. The period of War Communism had enhanced the position of the soviet state bureaucracy, and consequently, of petty-bourgeois ideas. The end of the Civil War and imperialist wars of intervention, created a sense of relief, and inevitable desire for a period of calm, which played into the ideology of those strengthened social forces, and the theory of building Socialism In One Country. After a brief recovery, following the end of WWI, the global economy, entered its period of stagnation, in the long wave cycle, bringing the consequent weakening of the economic and social position of the working-class, and strengthening of the position of the bourgeoisie.
The Stalinists sought to accommodate the bourgeoisie in order to try to avoid any further attacks on the USSR. Trotsky points out that, in Germany, at a time of revolutionary upswing, the Communist Party, guided by the Comintern, had first opposed the idea of establishing soviets, even where workers, in various areas, had been creating them spontaneously, resulting in an ebb of the revolutionary wave, and, then, began to call for them, at a time when the basis for doing so no longer existed. The same was true with calls for General Strikes and so on. The Russian Communist Party, via the Russian trades unions, also set up the Anglo-Russian Committee with the leaders of the TUC, in Britain.
This was the opposite of the principles of the United Front, earlier established by the Comintern, under the guidance of Lenin and Trotsky. The United Front is an alliance of rank and file communist and social-democratic workers, for particular aims, one of which is to facilitate a break of the social-democratic workers from their bourgeois leaders, and from their continued illusions in bourgeois-democracy. But, the ARC was an alliance with those very bourgeois/imperialist leaders, and reinforced their position and the illusions in them of the workers.
Part of the idea was that the TUC leaders would act as a buffer, and means of communication with British imperialism, assuring it of the intention of the USSR not to spread proletarian revolution, provided it was left alone, and that its intention was limited to achieving only bourgeois-democratic revolutions, where they had not yet taken place. The trouble was that imperialism, itself, was not concerned to see bourgeois-democratic revolutions, in the form of anti-colonial revolutions, which threatened its own colonial and semi-colonial empires, in India, Asia and Africa. Indeed, nor was it interested in bourgeois-democracy, where it, too, threatened its interests, in the form of a challenge from revolutionary workers movements. Hence its welcome for the rise of Mussolini's fascists, in Italy, in 1922.
The TUC leaders continued to support the role of British imperialism in China, and, when they had sucked all of the usefulness out of the ARC, the TUC leaders, having been provided with left cover for their betrayal of the General Strike, also simply walked away from the ARC.
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