【New Left Seminar Summary】 Chinese Communism and Democracy—May Fourth Movement in the Eyes of Chen Duxiu and Mao Zedong

 

New Left Society has invited Gregor Benton, Emeritus Professor of Chinese History at Cardiff University, to talk about the May Fourth Movement in the eyes of Chen Duxiu and Mao Zedong, and their idea of socialist democracy in China. This is the summary for the second New Left Seminar.

Q: Is May Fourth a turning point in Chinese intellectual history of democratic development  (i.e. from constitutional monarchy with democracy, to republican democracy, national self-determination, and to socialist democracy)?

Benton: During the ferment at the Paris Peace Conference after the end of World War I, new political forces came into being in China. Students represented a new vanguard of modern intelligentsia, as distinct from the old gentry style book-trained class that had previously dominated intellectual and cultural life in China. The working class went on strike for the first time, on a relatively large scale, in support of the campaign being waged by the students. At the political level, new developments emerged within China. There was talk of political reform and new parties, of a new vision of how the new Chinese state should be organized and controlled. At the international level, the Comintern in Moscow also began to play in Chinese politics. At the time of May Fourth, the Comintern, especially Lenin, saw China as a source of new light in the world, and proposed a policy on colonial revolution that attracted Chen Duxiu and other radicals in China.

In a word, the May Fourth Movement represented the transition from cultural radicalism and individual political action, what Lenin called the “individual terrorism,” to a more modern style of politics, one infected by Communism, which was beginning to make its presence felt within China. This was best exemplified within the May Fourth Movement by a debate between two main thinkers of May Fourth -- Hu Shih representing a liberal and centrist style of politics, who said that China would be changed drop by drop, inch by inch, and Li Dazhao, who favoured a solution that would remove big obstacles in a single sweep, by which he meant a Marxist assault on society that would link together China's many crises and dispel them through social revolution. This happened while Chen Duxiu himself had been temporarily removed from the scene, because he was in prison, but he accepted the position of Li Dazhao. 

Q: How had Chen Duxiu's thought matured over the two years' time between May Fourth 1919 and the founding of CCP in 1921?

Benton: Chen Duxiu, along with other Chinese important thinkers in the early 20th century, saw a need for change in mentality and culture as the key to a true and lasting revolution in China. Without such a change, any political reform would be empty. Looking back on the reforms that had followed the revolution of 1911, they concluded that they had in fact had gone nowhere, resulting in a rotten parliament full of compromises and corruption. The switch between 1919 and 1921 is often portrayed as a switch away from the cultural idea of changing Chinese mentality to one of changing China’s political structure. It is true that there was sucha transition, butiother things also played a role. Unlike the revolutionary movement elsewhere in the world at this time, Chinese radicalism remained deeply cultural in intent. Lu Xun said that we don't need doctors of the body, we need doctors of the soul. Chen Duxiu continued to think in this way as well. There is a profound difference between the approach of Chinese revolutionaries in 1921 and revolutionaries elsewhere in the world, who were more narrowly concentrated on a narrower idea of  politics. Yes, there was a transition between 1919 and 1921, but Chen Duxiu did not abandon his earlier views, he maintained them and gave them a new form and perspective.

Q:  How can we make the thoughts of Chen Duxiu relevant to the young generation again?

Benton: The political issues that Chen Duxiu tackled have in some respects been solved. China has asserted itself on the world stage, the issue of permanent revolution has been resolved,I would argue in favor of the Trotskyists, by virtue of developments in China between 1949 and 1952. But many of the other issues that were dear to the heart of Chen Duxiu continue to inspire Chinese young people today. One of them is democracy, Chen Duxiu’s first love. Wang Fanxi (one of Chen's co-thinkers and followers) said at the end of his life, it was to his first love that he returned, while in the internal exile near Chongqing in 1940-42. Democracy has always been a vexed issue in Communist thinking, but for early thinkers in the Communist movement, Marx and Engels, and to some extent, Lenin, democracy was inextricable from socialism. This was one of the things that drew Chen Duxiu close to Trotsky, who also stressed the essential relevance of democracy to any form of socialism. When the students came onto the Tiananmen Square in 1989, one of their slogans was “Hello Mr.Science, Hello Mr.Democracy”, which Chen Duxiu had advanced in 1919. This issue of democracy, far from receding, has become more and more important in China, where a political constituency wedded to the idea of a democratically ordered state has grown ever bigger in recent years. The democratic idea was central to Chen Duxiu’s writing and to his criticism of Stalinism, Nazism, and Chiang Kai-shek, the same authoritarian politics that young people within the sinophone are concerned about today. 

Another major issue for Chen Duxiu was language and the so-called Chinese dialects like Cantonese. At several points in his intellectual career, Chen addressed the relationship between language and democracy. When the Chinese Communist Party came to power in 1949, they instituted a wholesale imposition of a unified national language, Putunghau. This movement has been very successful, but it has met with resistance in places like Guangdong and Shanghai, where the national language based on Beijing speech is seen as a marker of bureaucratic backwardness. Young people are proud of their Cantonese, Shanghainese, called dialects within Chinese context but, for linguists, actual languages in their own right, with their own culture and grammar. Chen Duxiu wanted to bring about a switch in language structure in China that would reflect the modern world. He did favour the imposition of unified national language but wanted to respect the existing division of China into several dialect groups, each of which should be taken in locally as the basis for the creation of a new modern language appropriate to new times. I mention this because Chen Duxiu’s passion for cultural change is highly relevant in Hong Kong and China now.

Q: Would the proletariat revolution have been successful under the non-dictatorial democratic system demanded by Chen Duxiu?

Benton: Chen Duxiu and other critics of the line pursued by the Comintern under Stalin, who argued that China was not yet ripe for proletarian revolution. The Stalinists believed that China should pursue another course, a revolution based on a bloc of four classes, primarily the national bourgeois, the proletariat, the peasantry and the modern intelligentsia. Many people would argue that the idea of proletarian revolution, dependent solely on the workers, was impossible and unrealistic in China in the 1920s. The proletariat, according to Mao’s study on classes in Chinese society, was only one and a half-million strong, a reference to the advanced section of the industrial proletariat, whereas the population of China at the time was four hundred million. So the proletariat represented a tiny speck of humanity within a great sea of peasants living in a social system that had not yet reached modern proportions. It is true, of course, that the industrial proletariat was very small, and even the Trotskyists could see that the proletariat required an ally in the peasantry. In 1926-27, Trotsky argued that the Communist Party should mobilize the peasantry against the landed gentry, to carry out a revolution that dispatched both "feudalism" and capitalism simultaneously. Would this have been possible? Wang Fanxi was prepared to accept that such a strategy would not necessarily have succeeded, but nor did the policy pursued by the official Communist Party in this period. Ten of thousands of Communists were killed. The Communist party was destroyed and its remnants of were chased into the remote mountain where they had little influence. For the next five years, they continued to try to make revolution from their rural strongholds and mountain bases, but they were defeated. The Long March, which started in 1934, represented the final stage of the defeat of the Chinese Communist movement, although it was portrayed, retrospectively, by Communist historians and by Mao himself as a victorious march to a new front, in the war against Japan. The Communist Party, starting in 1921 under the influence of the Comintern, had been instructed to hide its own policy and to pretend that its strategy was the same as that of the KMT, which represented the possessing classes in China. Because of the failure of the Communists to mobilize their own resources on an independent basis, the Party laid itself open to destruction in 1927. This was the argument advanced by those (such as the Totskyists) who supported the idea of a proletarian line in 1927, rather than one of class collaboration.

Q: In Chen Duxiu's 1938's article "Is the Time of May Fourth Movement Over?", he emphasized the demands of democratic revolution since May Fourth over Mao's agrarian Soviet vision, while Mao drew the legitimacy of his "New Democracy" from May Fourth, proposing the proletariat alliance with the peasants, national bourgeois and petite bourgeoisie, against Chen's Trotskyist stance on proletariat dictatorship during transition to Socialism. How is Mao’s New Democracy different from Chen's democratic ideal?

Benton: “New Democracy” had nothing to do with the early history of the Communist revolution. As a topic, it first emerged in the late 1930s. Earlier Mao had no particular new strategy for carrying his revolution forward. At the end of the Long March, after arriving in Yan’an, he and his comrades developed a new theory of New Democracy, which was novel in Marxist terms. The theory was that the old revolution carried out by the bourgeoisie was no longer possible because imperialism had corrupted the bourgeoisie in the poor and colonial countries, so the tasks normally associated with the bourgeoisie -- national unification, the creation of a democratic system, the promotion of economic reform and modernisation -- although still relevant and necessary, could no longer be carried by the bourgeoisie but would fall to the working class, led by the communist party. Under the slogan of New Democracy, the Communist Party would advance its independent claim to power by manipulating elites and sections of the national bourgeois. Chen Duxiu himself had a policy that was not entirely dissimilar. After the defeat of 1927, Trotsky believed that a new revolution in China was no longer imminent in the wake of the defeat suffered by the communists in the late 1920s. The working class had been broken and the proletarian party had been destroyed in its urban centres, so a new way forward was necessary. The new way the Trotskyists adopted was the struggle for a “national assembly”. This was a classic democratic demand. Through such a campaign, Chen Duxiu and the Trotskyists hoped to reconstitute the proletariat as a political force and to rebuild the trade unions been destroyed in 1927. Some of Chen Duxiu's efforts took after his release from jail in 1937 were similar in some respects to what the Maoists were doing. He tried to bring within the orbit of his political movement dissident forces within the Chinese establishment. He tried to influence the revolutionary army in Fujian, which was hostile to Chiang Kai-shek, and in 1938 he sent Wang Fanxi and other Trotskyists to make contact with military forces of  a leftist disposition(by then in Wuhan), in order to infiltrate them and persuade them to follow a revolutionary policy that fulfilled the needs of peasantry. This failed, because the KMT had eyes everywhere and nipped Chen's scheme in the bud.