It did not take long for this policy of appeasement of the bourgeoisie to produce its bitter fruit. The Stalinist dominated Comintern had adopted it, not just in China, but also in Germany and Britain. In Germany, it led to the defeat of the 1923 Revolution. In Britain, it led to the defeat of the General Strike, as the Comintern, via the Anglo-Russian Committee, sought to cling to an alliance with the bourgeois, pro-imperialist leaders of the TUC, in the hope of using them to pressure British imperialism into not engaging in further intervention in Russia, as Stalin sought to pursue his policy of building Socialism In One Country. The TUC leaders waited for the opportune moment, and broke with the ARC, and failed to oppose British imperialism's role in China.
In China, the KMT, under Chiang Kai Shek, which had even been admitted to the Comintern, similarly waited for its moment, and, in April 1927, organised a coup in Shanghai, slaughtering thousands of Chinese worker communists. The Chinese workers quickly abandoned the Communist Party, in the face of this betrayal, but the Stalinists continued to present it as part of their plan; that they knew the bourgeoisie would betray the revolution, and that, now, having done so, it opened up the next phase of its development! They even gave glowing reports of increased membership following the slaughter. But, they then, repeated the error, by sending the workers and peasants into an alliance with the Left Kuomintang of Wang Chin Wei, where the experience was repeated again.
The Chinese Communist Party now became dominated not by industrial workers, which is the basis of permanent revolution, but by peasants. The Comintern, which had adopted an opportunist, tailist policy of seeking to appease and ally with the bourgeoisie, from 1923 onwards, now swung to a position of adventurism, and ultra-Left sectarianism – The Third Period – until, following Hitler's victory, in Germany, in 1933, it again swung back to its earlier opportunism and tailism, epitomised in its adoption of the strategy of the Popular Front alliance with the bourgeoisie, re-enacting all of the betrayals of the 1920's.
In China, it promoted adventurism, as with the Canton Uprising, that were doomed to fail, as well as turning to a peasant strategy of rural guerilla warfare, as it failed to mobilise support from workers in the urban areas. Part of the reason for these adventures, by this time, is they were designed to distract from the abject failure of the policies adopted by the Comintern under Stalin's direction, and the fact that all of these failures had been correctly predicted by Trotsky and the Left Opposition. Later, when Chiang Kai Shek also seized the Chinese Eastern Railway, which was under Russian control, uprisings and guerrilla actions were organised, in China, on instructions from Stalin, as a means both of distracting from this further consequence of his support for the KMT, and as a means of trying, at Chinese communists' expense, to distract the KMT's armed forces to fighting on a second front.
This domination of the Chinese Communist Party by peasants determined its future direction, and the use of guerrilla warfare, up to the revolution of 1949. It determined the nature of the regime established, but also, in the form of Maoism, Guevarism, and the use of such peasant based, guerrilla warfare had a major influence, as far as the attitude of large sections of the petty-bourgeois Left, to nationalist liberation struggles in the post-war period. I will examine that, after looking in detail at the events of the 1925-7 Revolution, as analysed by Trotsky, in a series of works from the time, and collated in Problems of The Chinese Revolution.
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