3 The Russian Influence

This volume does not have as one of its primary purposes an examination of relations between the Communist Party of China and the Communist Party of Russia, or the Comintern, or the Soviet Union as a whole. No adequate background has been provided here for such a task. But the book would be incomplete without some discussion of these organic connections and their more significant effects on the revolutionary history of China.

Certainly and obviously Russia had for the past dozen or more years been a dominating influence——and particularly among educated youth it had been the dominating external influence——on Chinese thought about the social, political, economic, and cultural problems of the country. This had been almost as true, though unacknowledged, in the Kuomintang areas as it had been an openly glorified fact in the soviet districts. Everywhere in China that youth had any fervent revolutionary beliefs the impact of Marxist ideology was apparent, both as a philosophy and as a kind of substitute for religion. Among such young Chinese, Lenin was almost worshiped, Stalin was the most popular foreign leader, socialism was taken for granted as the future form of Chinese society, and Russian literature had the largest following——Maxim Gorky's works, for example, outselling all native writers except Lu Hsun, who was himself a great social revolutionary although not a Communist.

And all that was quite remarkable for one reason especially. America, England, France, Germany, Japan, Italy, and other capitalist or imperialist powers had sent thousands of political, cultural, economic, or missionary workers into China, actively to propagandize the Chinese masses with credos of their own states. Yet for many years the Russians had not had a single school, church, or even a debating society in China where Marxist-Leninist doctrines could legally be preached. Their influence, except in the soviet districts, had been largely indirect. Moreover, it had been aggressively opposed everywhere by the Kuomintang. Yet few who had been in China during that decade, and conscious of the society in which they lived, would dispute the contention that Marxism, the Russian Revolution, and the new society of the Soviet Union had probably made more profound impressions on the Chinese people than all Christian missionary influences combined.

One had to remember that the Chinese Communists' adherence to the Comintern, and unity with the U.S.S.R., were voluntary, and could have been liquidated at any time by the Chinese from within. The role of the Soviet Union for them had been most potent as a living example that bred hope and faith. The Chinese Reds stoutly believed that the Chinese revolution was not isolated, and that hundreds of millions of workers, not only in Russia but throughout the world, were anxiously watching them, and when the time came would emulate them, even as they themselves had emulated the comrades in Russia. In the day of Marx and Engels it might have been correct to say that "the workers have no country, "but the Chinese Communists believed that, besides their own little bases of power, they had a mighty fatherland in the Soviet Union.

"The Soviet Government in China, "read the Constitution adopted at the first All-China Soviet Congress, "declares its readiness to form a revolutionary united front with the world proletariat and all oppressed nations, and proclaims the Soviet Union, the land of proletarian dictatorship, to be its loyal ally". How much the words italicized meant to the Chinese soviets, which in truth most of the time were completely isolated geographically, economically, and politically, was hard to understand for any Westerner who had never known a Chinese Communist.

This idea of having behind them a great ally——even though it was less and less validated by demonstrations of positive support from the Soviet Union——was of primary importance to the morale of the Chinese Reds. It imparted to their struggle the universality of a religious cause, and they deeply cherished it. When they shouted, "Long Live the World Revolution！"and "Proletarians of All Lands, Unite！"it was an idea that permeated all their teaching and faith, and in it they reaffirmed their allegiance to the dream of a Socialist world brotherhood.

It seemed to me that these concepts had already shown that they could change Chinese behavior. I never suffered from any "antiforeignism"in the Reds' attitude toward me. They were certainly anti-imperialist, but racial prejudice seemed to have been sublimated in class antagonism that knew no national boundaries. Even their anti-Japanese agitation was not directed against the Japanese on a racial basis. In their propaganda the Reds constantly emphasized that they opposed only the Japanese militarists, capitalists, and other "Fascist oppressors, "and that the Japanese masses were their potential allies. Indeed, they derived great encouragement from that conviction. This changing of national prejudice from racism to class antagonism was no doubt traceable to the education in Russia of scores of the Chinese Red leaders, who had attended Sun Yat-sen University, or the Red Academy, or some other school for international cadres of communism, and had returned as teachers to their own people.

One example of their internationalism was the intense interest with which the Reds followed the events of the Spanish Civil War. Bulletins were issued in the press, were pasted up in the meeting rooms of village soviets, were announced to the armies at the front. Special lectures were given by the political department on the cause and significance of the Spanish war, and the "people's front"in Spain was contrasted with the "united front"in China. Mass meetings of the populace were summoned, demonstrations were held, and public discussions were encouraged. It was quite surprising sometimes to find, even far back in the mountains, Red farmers who knew a few rudimentary facts about such things as the Italian conquest of Abyssinia and the German-Italian "invasion"of Spain, and spoke of these powers as the "Fascist allies"of their enemy, Japan. Despite their geographical isolation, these rustics now knew much more about that aspect of world politics, thanks to radio news and wall newspapers and Communist lecturers and propagandists, than the rural population anywhere else in China.

The strict discipline of Communist method and organization had seemingly produced among Chinese Marxists a type of cooperation and a suppression of individualism which the average "Old China Hand, "or treaty-port merchant, or missionary who "knew Chinese psychology"would have found impossible to believe without witnessing for himself. In their political life the existence of the individual was an atomic pulse in the social whole, the mass, and must bend to its will, either consciously in the role of leadership, or unconsciously as part of the material demiurge. There had been disputes and internecine struggles among the Communists, but none severe enough to deal a fatal injury to either the army or the Party.

Had Nanking been able at any time to split their military and political strength into contradictory and permanently warring factions, as it did with all other Opposition groups——as Chiang Kai-shek did with his own rivals for power within the Kuomintang——the task of Communist suppression might have been rewarded with final success. But its attempts were failures. For example, a few years before, Nanking had hoped to utilize the worldwide Stalin-Trotsky controversy to divide the Chinese Communists, but although so-called Chinese "Trotskyites"did appear, they never developed any important mass influence or following.

The Reds had generally discarded much of the ceremony of traditional Chinese etiquette, and their psychology and character were quite different from our old conceptions of Chinese. They were direct, frank, simple, undevious, and scientific-minded. They were also implacable enemies of the old Chinese familism.^[*]

With their zealous adoration of the Soviet Union there had naturally been a lot of copying and imitating of foreign ideas, institutions, methods, and organizations. The Chinese Red Army was constructed on Russian military lines, and much of its tactical knowledge derived from Russian experience. Social organizations in general followed the pattern laid down by Russian Bolshevism. Many Red songs were put to Russian music and widely sung in the soviet districts. Suwei-ai——Chinese for "soviet"——was only one example of many words transliterated directly from Russian into Chinese.

But in their borrowing there was much adaptation; few Russian ideas or institutions survived without drastic changes to suit the milieu in which they operated. The empirical process of a decade eliminated indiscriminate wholesale importations, and also resulted in the introduction of peculiarly Chinese features. A process of imitation and adaptation of the West had, of course, been going on in the bourgeois world of China, too——for there was very little left even of poetry of the ancient feudal heritage, that "scrap material of a great history"as Spengler calls it, which the Chinese were able to use in building either a modern bourgeois or a Socialist society capable of grappling with the vast new demands of the country. While the Reds leaned heavily on Russia for organizational methods with youth, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek not only used Italian bombing planes to destroy them, but also borrowed from the Y.M.C.A. in building his anti-Communist New Life movement.

And finally, of course, the political ideology, tactical line, and theoretical leadership of the Chinese Communists had been under the close guidance, if not positive direction, of the Communist International. Great benefits undoubtedly accrued to the Chinese Reds from sharing the collective experience of the Russian Revolution, and from the leadership of the Comintern. But it was also true that the Comintern could be held responsible for serious reverses suffered by the Chinese Communists in the anguish of their growth.

^[*]Here I do not speak of the peasant masses as a whole, but of a Communist vanguard. But even among the sovietized peasantry, attitudes were in striking contrast with those described, for example, in Arthur H. Smith's Chinese Characteristics (N.Y., 1894).