An Interview with Historian Stephen Smith on Internationalist Nationalism in the Early Chinese Labour and Left-wing movement

 

Interviewed by K

The revolutionary 1920s does not merely leave a legendary page in the official history of the Chinese Communist Party, more importantly, the internationalist spirit and action burgeoning across the political and cultural fields during that period remains pertinent to the agenda of  today’s scattered labour and left-wing movements around the globe. To reignite the discussion on the internationalist tradition, we talked to Stephen Smith, Professor of History at the University of Oxford, on the labour participation and national imagination in several significant historical events in the 1920s of Chinese history.  The interview is based on Prof.Smith’s works of the international history of Communism in modern China and Russia: Like Cattle and Horses: Nationalism and Labor in Shanghai, 1895-1927, and  Revolution and the People in Russia and China: A Comparative History.

 

Q: While May Fourth is often celebrated as a patriotic cultural movement, with students and intellectuals as protagonists, what is the historical significance of retelling May Fourth from a labour perspective? How did the national identity forged in May Fourth incorporate the intellectual discourses of democratic individuality, internationalism and class politics?

Smith: It is absolutely right that we still tend to think about the May Fourth as a movement of intellectuals, tied closely to the New Culture movement, which first articulated modern nationalism. In recent years, there has been a tendency to widen the perspective on the May Fourth, and to situate it  in a wider, anti-imperialist context, particularly in the context of ‘peace-making’ at the end of the First World War. One thinks, for example, of the March 1st Movement in Korea, which was somewhat similar, although Korea was under more violent colonial domination than China. Both movements were responses to colonial subordination and to the reimposition of colonial control that came Versailles. In this global moment movements of national liberation could not be anything but international in their outlook.

In my early work, one of the things I wanted to do was to bring out the importance of the nascent working class to the nationalist, anti-imperialist movement in China. The May Fourth protests against Versailles took the form of the ‘triple strike’ (sanba) by students, workers and small business. The role played by the workers in the May Fourth Movement, it seemed to me, had been greatly underestimated. I wanted to emphasise that a nascent labour movement had already existed for some years before the arrival of the Comintern in China in 1920. Strikes had been plentiful during during the First World War as prices increased, and workers had been crucial to the boycotts of American goods in 1905 and of Japanese goods in 1915. And in 1919 workers strikes and early unions played a significant if not dominant role. it remains the case, however, that it the arrival of the Comintern in 1920 and the formation of the Chinese Communist Party the following year that really galvanized strike activity and labour unions. From a comparative perspective, Chinese workers demonstrated their economic – and under the CCP, their political power – very early:  in 1922 in Hong Kong and Guangzhou; and then, in a massive way, in Shanghai during the May Thirtieth Movement of 1925 and the Canton-Hong Kong strike-boycott which lasted for 16 months in 1925-26. Shanghai workers brought Japanese and British textile factories to a halt and their Cantonese counterparts established very effective controls over international trade. The Canton-Hong Kong strike-boycott of 1925-26 was an extraordinary example of class-based internationalism. Moreover, its breadth of vision was evident in the fact that it began to challenge racial discrimination against Chinese seafarers, strove to improve the situation of female workers, and demanded rights of association and free expression. It also saw the emergence of the working class leaders, such as Su Chaocheng and Lin Weimin.  

In this early work I also wanted to emphasise that new social identities of nation and class interacted with one another. In an older historiography, the class-based movements of workers and peasants were treated separately from the growth of nationalism. In most countries labour movements developed within the framework of the nation-state, so the relationship between class and nationalism was an intimate one. In China in the 1920s, however, a nation-state barely existed at least until the Nationalist government was formed in 1928. Until 1911 the imperial state tended to present itself as a civilization, “tianxia''; and after 1911 different visions of a Chinese nation competed, all concerned to avoid the terrible prospect of ‘national extinction’.  Following May Fourth, the mobilization of workers (and to a lesser extent, peasants through peasant associations in the South) did much to define a conception of the Chinese nation as one rooted in the common people, a vision of nationhood in which national liberation was defined not only against foreign imperialism but also against China’s native political and economic elites, which were seen as being compromised by their acquiescence in the decline of China and by their willingness to collaborate with the foreign powers. There was a different, KMT version of the nation that downplayed class division and worked to build a strong, authoritarian state mainly through an army, but this emerged mainly after 1928 when the CCP was crushed. The ascendancy of a class-based anti-imperialist vision of the nation, especially during the Northern Expedition of 1926-27, was due in large part to the power of the working class as expressed through mass strikes and rapid formation of trade unions. New forms of organisation, such as strike committees, trade unions, and committees that checked goods coming into ports were a  dramatic expression of the capacity of the workers to shape the nationalist movement. But in the 1920s the nationalism of the labour movement looked outwards to the world, to imperialism on a global scale, as well as towards Soviet Russia. In this period, the Comintern in this period played a genuinely internationalist role, linking class struggle to the struggles of the colonised people of the world and to a global socialist revolution, although it became increasingly to represent the state interests of the Soviet Union. 

Two things to sum up then: firstly, if we are thinking about China in a larger context, one sees the unusual power of labour within the early nationalist movement; secondly, and at a more ideological level, one sees the way in which nationalism in this period was closely aligned to a wide-ranging internationalism. However, following Chiang Kai-shek’s suppression of the CCP in 1927 and the subordination of the Comintern to Soviet state interests under Stalin, nationalism lost some of its internationalism, although this was never complete, since both the KMT and CCP were not allowed to forget that the existence of China was threatened from 1932 by the advance of Japan. And their struggle against Japanese domination after 1937 had a strongly global dimension (see the Anti-Comintern Pact of 1936).

There was thus a breadth of vision to the labour movement in China in the 1920s. This was necessarily so, because workers are at the heart of a semi-colonial capitalism that was necessarily oriented towards international capitalism. But of course, workers were a tiny proportion of the population, and so I disagree with what became of a Trotskyist position after 1927, that a worker revolution could have been successful in China. In the 1920s, although the power of labour was extraordinary, especially between 1925 and 1927, the critical task of mobilizing the vast, rural majority of the nation lay ahead.

But after 1927, when the CCP hunkered down in the countryside, the conception of the nation narrowed. The nationalism that developed in the countryside, as Chalmers Johnson argued long ago, was a response to war with Japan,  It was a reaction to barbarism and the desperate struggle to survive. It was a nationalism more comparable to that in other countries, one that demanded sacrifice and unity across social classes.  Even so, it never degenerated into chauvinism, still less fascism, as nationalism in many parts of Europe did in this period.

 Q: How did the ambivalent discourses of class (influenced by Anarchism, Liberalism and Communism,Mozi's ethics) budded after the May Fourth Movement reveal the "uneven and combined development" of Chinese modernity?

Smith: First, I would argue that “uneven” is the secondary element in Trotsky’s idea of combined and uneven development. There is a tendency to put the emphasis on unevenness by by emphasising Trotsky’s concern with economic backwardness. Certainly, his theory builds on the idea that latecomers, i.e. those countries that come to industrial capitalism late, can draw on the benefits of technology and on forms of industrial organisations of the most up-to-date kind. But I think Trotsky’s theory was most original in analysing the combination of backward and modern social and cultural elements that shape late-comer societies. For example in China, after 1911, and some would say even after 1898, there was a chaotic and rapid arrival of ideas from the West and from Japan – ideas of social Darwinism, constitutionalism, social democracy, guild socialism, anarchism – that were seized on by a newly emerging intelligentsia eager to modernize their country. The most up-to-date ideas and cultural movements thus arrived in a society that was still steeped in Confucian culture. For Trotsky it was this contradictory combination of economic, cultural and social processes that was conducive to radical change. One can see how China rapidly entered a global modernity, as shown in films, novel-writing, woodcut printing and the like, and at how Chinese intellectuals and cultural producers used these media to reflect of China’s backwardness and semi-colonial condition. For the small minority of literate workers these new cultural trends shaped their understandings of class.  Class identity, for example, became associated with an assertion of individuality: the demand for improvement in their wages and labour conditions was part of an assertion of self that was rooted in a conviction that as human beings they had innate dignity and political rights. This assertion of self might extend to the clothes one wore, the things one read, or to ideas of romantic love. By the time of Yan’an, these kinds of ideas were easily labelled as “bourgeois” or “petty-bourgeois”, and collectivism was now defined not in terms of the free association of individuals, as it still was in the 1920s but in terms of self-sacrifice and the subordination of the individual to the collective. 

This change in the culture of Chinese Communism was in part forced on the CCP by pressures of war, fierce political struggle with the KMT, and the effects of the global depression in the 1930s. lt was also about the rapid Stalinization of its practices and orientations. This is not to say that what happened to the political culture of the CCP was absolutely predetermined, but the space of agency for the party was very limited.

Incidentally, although Stalinism was central in shaping the political culture of CCP, Mao Zedong drew on certain indigenous cultural traditions of universalism (tianxia) and datong in his efforts to adapt Soviet socialism to Chinese conditions.

Q: Did the connection between internationalism and national identity reinforced by May Fourth leave any influence on the Communist and workers’ activities in the pre- and post-1949 period?

Smith: As I mentioned earlier, the CCP, holed up in the countryside, was much less exposed to the internationalist pressures and ideas than it had been during the 1920s. Moreover, internationalism increasingly meant looking to the Soviet Union as the model to be emulated. The relationship between the CCP and the Soviet Communist Party was, of course, always tense and, after 1949, it was not long before the CCP’s way of ‘doing’ internationalism came to deviate from that of the Soviet model, even though following Stalin’s death in 1953, Khrushchev turned the Soviet Union in a more internationalist direction. From China’s appearance at the Bandung conference in 1956, Zhou Enlai steered the CCP’s internationalism in a direction that would exacerbate the Sino-Soviet conflict. The CCP called for militant anti-imperialist struggle across the colonial and newly decolonized world, but such internationalism was abstract in character and by the 1960s largely boiled down to polemics against the ‘revisionism’ of the Soviet Union. That said, despite the poverty of China, the PRC did provide military and other forms of aid to anti-imperialist struggles, although its primary emphasis was on developing national power.

If we are to revive genuinely internationalist politics today, it is vital to look to history for inspiration. And there is much to learn from the struggles of working people in China across the twentieth century. But this should never entail idealization or romanticization of the past. The history of the communist movement in the twentieth century – and not only in China - on balance was a negative one for those working people it claimed to represent. And if there is to be a revival of internationalist politics today we must also learn from its terrible mistakes.