J. T. Murphy

Communists in China

May Leave the Wuhan Government

Bucharin’s Article


Source: Workers’ Life, July 15, 1927
Publisher: Communist Party of Great Britain
Transcription/Markup: Brian Reid
Public Domain: Marxists Internet Archive (2008). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.


Moscow

Writing in Pravda on the Chinese situation Bucharin, the Communist leader, says that Wuhan has outlived its role as the organising-centre of the revolution. Communists ought immediately to quit the Wuhan Government and explain to the workers and peasants why they are leaving.

NOTE: The Wuhan (formerly Hankow) Nationalist Government of the Kuomintang during the past twelve mouths gained a series of sweeping victories in China, and to do so found it more and more necessary to rely on the workers and peasants. Its chief General, Chiang-kai-shek, however, set up a government of his own, and was followed by a number of other generals. Instead of dealing severely with him and sending an expedition to crush him the Wuhan Government has vacillated and delayed, being unwilling to rely on the workers and peasants.

The Executive of the Comintern, continues Bucharin, was a thousand times right when it suggested that the Chinese Communist Party should leave the Government.

To leave the Nationalist Government would not mean that Communists should leave the Kuomintang. The Communist Party should defend its position inside the Kuomintang and intensify its work among the masses, exposing the treachery of the leaders.

The actual leadership of the Central Committee of the Chinese C.P. failed, says Bucharin. It prevented the development of the agrarian revolution. Its more opportunist leaders even advocated leaving the Kuomintang.

In view of this situation it was necessary to call an extraordinary conference of the Party to re-elect the Central Committee and to conduct an energetic struggle, even to exclusion from the Party of those who consider that it must follow the trail of bourgeois leaders in the Kuomintang.