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From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 48, 29 November 1948, pp. 1 & 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
The position of Chiang Kai-shek’s regime remains precarious militarily and economically, with prospects for any significant improvement in the economic sphere being the slimmest of all. Overshadowing the developments on the military fronts, where the initiative still remains in the hands of the Chinese Stalinists, is the catastrophic condition behind Chiang Kai-shek’s lines.
With the dismal failure of the currency reform (the introduction of new “gold” currency), inflation continues to rage unabated as the sharpest expression of the economic crisis. Chiang is now confronted with an economic breakdown verging on chaos.
The latest reports from the military fronts indicate that the vaunted successes of Chiang’s armies around Suchow represent nothing more than the first phase of the battle. The initial assault has been repulsed, and that is all. The decisive battles for Suchow, the gateway to Nanking, still lie ahead, with the besieging armies already regrouping for another thrust. At the same time, the Chinese Stalinists have scored important advances on other fronts and are apparently tightening a ring around Peiping and several other far more strategic centers.
The demands of the military fronts are becoming more and more pressing; and Chiang’s regime is unable to supply the cities with the barest necessities. Recent dispatches make it quite clear that only emergency measures by American Far East authorities brought scanty supplies of rice to Shanghai, Nanking and other places.
Chiang’s “personal” plea to Truman for help must be judged in the light of this situation. Chiang’s chances for survival hinge entirely on the decision now being made in Washington.
To the American imperialists China appears as a bottomless pit. The conservative columnist Mark Sullivan outlines the dilemma facing Washington rather graphically. Here is what he writes:
“But the cost (of making Chiang economically and militarily strong) would be unthinkable, literally so, in the sense that no one can think accurately about what the cost would be. A figure current in Washington is $5,000,000,000. But the more accurate estimate is one which admits that it cannot be accurate at all. A phrase used by persons who earnestly desire to save China, but are also realistic and candid, is ‘an indefinite amount for an indefinite number of years’.”
N.Y. Herald-Tribune, Nov. 24)
The surprising thing is not that Chiang’s regime is tottering but that it has survived as long as it has. For this Chiang owes thanks not to the billions that Wall Street’s government in Washington has already pumped into China, but rather to the policy of the Chinese Stalinists. Had they followed a revolutionary program, uprisings would have flared in one city after another and swept Chiang and his rotten retinue away long ago.
It is an ironic fact that in 1925–27, when the Stalinists were betraying the revolution in China by their alliance with Chiang, they won victories for this warlord through precisely such uprisings of workers in Shanghai and other key cities. So fearful of the revolutionary workers have the Stalinists become in 1948 that they dare not employ – in their own behalf – the tactics they once so unhesitatingly employed for Chiang’s sake.
There has been thus far not a single report of workers’ risings on the approach of Chinese Red armies, even though several big Manchurian cities have already fallen. Nor has there been the slightest sign that the Stalinist leaders in China would welcome such developments. On the contrary, they have done, as they continue to do, everything in their power to limit the struggle to the military plane.
This course flows from their entire policy which is not that of revolution but of compromise with the Chinese bourgeoisie.
They are not at all opposed to a coalition government; they have simply “refused” a coalition with Chiang, and this only because it has been flatly rejected by Chiang. They have not withdrawn their demand for a coalition with the “progressive” capitalists.
Their actual program is limited to a number of agrarian reforms and to the preservation of capitalism in a “modified” form in China. This is a repetition, in an altered form, of the same policy the Stalinists pursued in 1925–27, when they betrayed the revolution on the pretext that China was not ripe for the same historic road as was taken in Russia in 1917.
If in 1925–27, they called for the establishment of the “democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants,” then today they call for a “new democratic revolution,” a Chinese version of the “New People’s Democracies” promoted by Stalinism in Eastern Europe.
The basic line of the Chinese Stalinists was summed up by their leading spokesman, Mao Tse-tung, One year ago he declared in an address to the Central Committee of the Chinese C.P.:
“The objects that the new democratic revolution pursues are to eliminate only feudalism and monopoly capitalism, only the landlord class and bureaucratic bourgeoisie – not capitalism in general and not the petty bourgeoisie and middle bourgeoisie. Because of the backwardness of China’s economy, it will still be necessary to permit the existence for a long period of the capitalist economy represented by the broad petty bourgeoisie and the middle bourgeoisie even after the nationwide victory of the revolution.”
These remarks were levelled at the time against the so-called “left extremists” inside the Stalinist ranks, who questioned the official line. The same policy continues to be conducted today against the interests of the Chinese proletariat and the peasant poor. It is this policy of the Stalinists that must be above all borne in mind by the American workers in following the course of the Chinese events.
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