Max Shachtman
Archive
Marxist Writers’
Archives
From Labor Action, Vol. 13 No. 47, 21 November 1949, pp. 1 & 3.
Transcribed &anp; marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
We have just received evidence from trustworthy sources that the fight is already on between those whom the Kremlin in Moscow feels will act as its utterly reliable agents in China and those it feels may very well follow the course taken by Tito in Yugoslavia. The new Stalinist regime has hardly consolidated itself in China – yet the jockeying for position and control is now under way behind the scenes.
To all outward appearances, the Chinese Stalinist government is headed by Mao Tse-tung. He is president of the Central Government Council recently set up by the Stalinists and chairman of the People’s Revolutionary Army Committee. The work of organizing and directing the Stalinist drive to power in China has been in his hands for years. Now that the drive is practically completed, the question of his reliability from the standpoint of Moscow arises with pointed urgency. The Russian imperialists have already suffered one blow from Yugoslavia’s demand for independence. They do not want to lake a chance on being struck an even heavier blow by a similar development in China, which is a hundred times more important than Yugoslavia from every standpoint.
To surround Mao with more reliable (that is more servile) agepts, and to replace him completely if he proves to be intractable – this is now one of Moscow’s primary concerns.
The principal agent whom Moscow now seems to be pushing to the fore is one Liu Shao-chi. Up to recently Liu’s name was practically unknown, not only abroad but in China as well. Only those with the longest memories recall him as one of the lesser figures in the Stalinist putsch which set up the shortlived “Soviet Republic” in South China in the 1928–29 period. After the collapse of this adventure, Liu disappeared from the political scene in China and undoubtedly spent the whole period up to his reappearance in Moscow. There he was molded and trained in the unquestioning obedience and fidelity which Stalin demands of all his vassals, Russian and foreign.
Although Liu does not appear to have had anything to do with the work and the battles of the Chinese Stalinists under Mao Tse-tung and Chu Teh in all these past years, he has suddenly turned up as a prominent figure in Stalinist China – not second to Mao but already equal to him.
Liu has not, so far as is known, any administrative office in the new Stalinist government. But already he has been designated as one of the vice-presidents and as vice-chairman of the People’s Revolutionary Army Committee. The propaganda machine is hard at work to “popularize” him, if not as “the” leader, then at least as leader on an equal plane with Mao.
Recently, a Hong Kong newspaper published an interview in which the Chinese. Stalinists were pictured, with studied humility, as men who laid no claim to perfection. Upon the appearance of the interview, Chou En-lai, the Stalinist minister of foreign affairs, sent the newspaper a protesting telegram which declared that there WERE two “perfect ones.” Mao was one of them. The hitherto almost unknown Liu Shao-chi was the other.
A few weeks ago (October 4), Joseph Starobin, whose intimate knowledge of the Kremlin’s up-to-date propaganda line has often been commented on, referred in his Daily Worker column to Liu as the “dean of China’s Communists” – an exalted position which nobody, not even Starobin, ever thought of attributing to Liu until quite recently. There is more than one reason for the conclusion that Liu has been sent from Moscow as watchman, if not substitute, for Mao.
As for Mao, it is not without, interest that he neither lives nor has an office in Peiping. For the most part, he stays out in the hills, in an enclosure known as the Hunting Park. The man who, before the big Stalinist victories in China, moved freely about Yunnan and was easily accessible, is now as hard to get to and as heavily guarded as an emperor. Every person or vehicle that moves on the adjacent highway is stopped and searched; at night, nobody and nothing moves. The question is: Is he an “emperor” or a distinguished prisoner? Perhaps Starobin can answer the question. Or perhaps he may be taken unaware by the answer when it breaks out in public ...
The encirclement of Mao is even more evident in the case of Chu Teh. Like Mao, Chu did not get his Stalinist training in Russia but in his native land. Like Mao, but even more so, Chu grew to prominence and position in long and bitter struggle as the effective leader of armed forces right in China – not in the Lux Hotel in Moscow or in the Lenin-Stalin School. His renown was not manufactured and did not need to be. But while his loyalty to Stalinism as a social and political creed is as unquestioned as Tito’s, his loyalty to Russian Stalinism is evidently not beyond question.
Although he was the nominal as well as the actual head: of the Chinese “Red Army” since 1927-28, Chu Teh’s prominence in the military field has undergone almost an eclipse in the recent period. His place has been taken increasingly by a Stalinist named Lin Piao. Lin Piao will be heard more and more of, the less is heard of Chu Teh. The former has all the earmarks of the Moscow-trained, Moscow-controlled, Moscow-loyal Stalinist.
In the long years of the Stalinist military struggles from 1917–1928 onward, his name was practically unknown. As late as the Chinese Who’s Who of 1946, he is not to be found among the numerous Stalinist notables. He first came to public notice as the head of the Manchurian Stalinist army toward the end of the Second World War, as the Russians moved toward their brief war with the Japanese. Lin’s Manchurian army was armed and trained by the Russians, and when the signal was given, this army speedily smashed the Kuomintang forces in Manchuria and broke through into North China.
At that time, operations in Shantung and thence southward to the Yangtze were under the command of a pretty obscure Stalinist named Chen Yi. His force was built up and equipped in the Russian militarized zone at the southern tip of Manchuria (the Port Arthur-Dairen area). After the capture of Peiping and Tientsin, Lin Piao’s forces were rushed south to Chen Yi’s support and then on to Hankow.
When Shanghai was taken, Chen Yi was put out of the race by his appointment as “mayor,” that is, military governor of Shanghai. But Lin’s forces continued onward. It is Lin who took Hankow, Lin who took Nanking and Shanghai, Lin who continued to conduct the whole southern campaign. It is Lin Piao, and not Chu Teh, who has been given all the actual military leadership and all the outstanding credit for the victories.
Very significant, also, is the fact that Lin’s political commissar, who accompanied his forces from Manchuria, where he was first, installed, to North China and then southward, was Li Li-san, who, unlike the new Russian agents in China, has a fairly well-known history. Li is an old Chinese Stalinist, who was all but obliterated from the leadership of the party for his “ultra-leftism” about twenty years ago. However, he not only spent most of that period in Moscow but seems to have rehabilitated himself completely in the eyes of the Kremlin. He returned to China only in recent years, along with Liu Shao-chin, the “other perfect one,” and was quickly assigned the key position of commissar of Lin Piao’s Manchurian troops.
Li’s importance among the Chinese Stalinists may be gauged from the fact that it was he, and not the other “prominent” Stalinist figures, who represented the CP in the meetings and negotiations with General George C. Marshall in Mukden. Li has now been made boss of the new “trade-union” federation set up by the Stalinists and given charge of the specially created post of “minister of labor,” which acquires special importance with the “turn to the proletariat” which is being undertaken by the new regime.
And Chu Teh? Not only did this old military personality have nothing to do with the military operations and spectacular military successes of the past year, but his relegation to the sidelines and to more or less honorific titles has become so conspicuous in Peiping, that some of the Stalinists are now engaged in spreading studied stories about his “old age” and about how he has earned the right in the past to take it easy now.
Chu Teh is 63 years old; up to quite recently, all the propaganda stories about him, both the official ones told by such writers as Edgar Snow and Anna Louis Strong, have gone out of their way to underline Chu’s physical sturdiness and vigor. The cause for his being shifted to the sidelines undoubtedly lies more with Chu’s retention of political vigor and ambition than with his loss of physical vigor.
It is of course impossible from here to judge exactly how widespread, intensive and acute is the struggle between the two forces: between the “Titoists” – that is, those who want independence from Russia so that China may remain or become an arena for exploitation exclusively in the hands of’ the Chinese Stalinist bureaucracy – and the out-and-out quislings who serve Moscow’s imperial plan to keep China as much an obedient vassal as Rumania or Hungary.
That a struggle between these two forces is inevitable in any case, may now be taken for granted. That it has already started in China, that the chessmen are being shifted around in the bureaucratic spheres for the showdown to come, is clear from the evidence at hand. It is doubtful that the American Stalinists, at least, will be imprudent enough to challenge the evidence itself.
Max Shachtman Archive |
Marxist Writers’ Archives |
Last updated on 11 December 2022