A Review Of P'eng Shu'tse and Ch’en Pi-lan’s book: "The Chinese Communist Party In Power�

By Steven Argue

This book contains four basic elements that despite the name of the book do not all deal directly with the Chinese Communist Party in power. The first element of the book deals with the political history of P'eng Shu'tse and his wife. The second deals with the theoretical differences between Stalin and Trotsky, P'eng Shu'tse and Mao Tse-tung. A third element deals with the Chinese Communist Party’s rise to power. The third element then finally deals with P'eng Shu'tse’s analysis of the Chinese Communist Party in power. All of these elements are important to the message of the book so I will try to cover them all briefly here.

Background, The Political History of P'eng Shu'tse

In 1911 the feudal Qing dynasty fell. It had been destroyed by years of humiliating imperialist subjugation as well as having been destroyed by its own feudal backwardness and a yearning of the people for a better society. Included in this subjugation were unfair trade policies and the British militarily enforced selling of opium to the population.

The new capitalist government, however, failed to stand up to imperialism in any meaningful way and left the feudal relations of the countryside intact. As a result, the new government also collapsed and authority disintegrated into the hands of regional warlords under the sway of competing imperialist interests.

It was during this time of chaos, in 1920, that P'eng Shu'tse joined the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). He joined the party at a time when the total failure of capitalism in China was self-evident as was the need to end imperialist subjugation. Communism held a strong appeal in its advocacy for anti-imperialist revolution as well as for worker’s power, the smashing of feudal land relations, and for the end of the subjugation of women and youth to the old patriarchal system.

In 1921 P'eng Shu'tse moved to Moscow where he attended the Communist University of the Toilers of the East until 1924. There he was elected and served as secretary of the Moscow branch of the CCP for the time he was there.

At the time of P'eng Shu'tse’s attendance at the university the revolutionary government of the Soviet Union was young and had only been born four years earlier of the October 1917 revolution. The revolutionary leadership in power was the Communist Party under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky. Joseph Stalin was part of that communist party as well, and he held some power, but he had not yet risen to the position of absolute power that he would later enjoy.

Upon P'eng Shu'tse’s return to China in 1924 he published two articles in the CCP’s theoretical magazine, New Youth, and the CCP’s official organ, New Guide, both of which he became editor of. One was a defense of the Boxer movement of 1900 as an anti-imperialist and not an anti-foreigner movement. Another was on the nature of the coming revolution in China, where he argued that the wealthy classes of China were timid and weak and utterly incapable of leading the bourgeois anti-imperialist revolution. He pointed out that the only hope for revolution would be one led by the working class that was socialist in nature.

A year earlier Mao Tse-tung had published an article in New Guide advocating the opposite position of P'eng Shu'tse on the nature of the coming revolution. In it Mao advocated a bourgeois capitalist government and called on the unity of the merchants to help bring it about.

The Theory Of Permanent Revolution, The Koumintang, And The Interference Of Moscow

The debate between Mao Tse-tung and P'eng Shu'tse was not a new one for the socialist movement. The same debate had taken place in Russia before the 1917 revolutions. The ideas of P'eng Shu'tse dealing with the conditions of China coincided heavily with Leon Trotsky’s analysis of Russian conditions written in what later became called the Theory of Permanent Revolution.

Trotsky wrote the Theory of Permanent Revolution in a Czarist jail after his experiences in the failed 1905 revolution. He saw through his experiences in the revolution that not only was the working class the only class interested and capable of carrying out the revolution; he also saw that the Russian revolution would have to be socialist to succeed.

The reasons given by Trotsky were several, but the most important being that the capitalist class would sabotage production if the workers took power. He correctly saw that the only way to have a working economy was to nationalize industry and to implement a socialist economy.

Lenin later adopted these fundamental tenants of the theory of Permanent Revolution in his famous April thesis of 1917. As a result Lenin and Trotsky’s parties merged at that time to lead the socialist revolution against the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries who since taking power in February were restarting the war with Germany on behalf of the bourgeoisie and refusing land reform and a socialist revolution.

Trotsky also explained that not only was there no need for Russia to go through a bourgeois capitalist revolution, but that the bourgeoisie was utterly incapable of leading such a revolution in Russia. He explained that the working class had developed to a point that the bourgeoisie feared revolution more than anything else because they saw that a revolution, no matter how small in its original leadership’s goals, would potentially unleash the power of the working class to carry out a full socialist revolution. Thus the bourgeoisie sided with the old feudal system instead of trying to bring about their own power.

Trotsky explained this phenomenon as compared to the developments in the west, such as the the bourgeois revolution in the United States, through his theory for Russia of Combined and Uneven Development. Simply put, the technological advances of the capitalist west had become part of Russian society and had created a working class capable of overstepping the bounds of the bourgeois revolution against Czarism, making the bourgeoisie uninterested in any kind of revolution.

In Russia the Menshevik’s ridiculous attempts at establishing a bourgeois government confirmed this with the bourgeois representatives they appointed trying to impose military dictatorship and hand power back to the old feudal system. Later Stalin repeated this same sort of mistake carried out by the Mensheviks in his support for the corrupt and murderous bourgeois Kuomintang in China. In fact, in Russia, Stalin had been negotiating the unity of the Menshevik and Bolshevik Parties before Lenin’s arrival from exile in April.

As Stalin took the reigns of power in the Soviet Union he also exerted his influence within the Chinese Communist Party to remove P'eng Shu'tse and other like minded leaders that opposed Moscow’s position of dissolving much of the CCP’s work into the corrupt and brutal Kuomintang. Despite the Koumintang carrying out numerous massacres of the CCP and their worker peasant supporters, the CCP maintained this position of subjegation to the leadership of the Kuomintang from for much of the time from the late 1920’s up until not long before the 1949 revolution when Chaing Kai-sheck’s attacks finally forced Mao onto the road of leading the struggle for power.

Due to P'eng Shu'tse’s opposition to any kind of support for the Koumintang and his defense of Trotsky and Permanent Revolution he was first stripped of his leadership position in the CCP and later completely purged with other fellow travelers. They set up their own political organization and publications. These positions in light of Chaing Kai-sheck’s massacres, including his butchering of the workers of Shanghai in 1927, and Chaing Kai-sheck’s failure to fight the Japanese, attracted recruits to their Trotskyist organization, but also attracted the oppression of the Kuomintang themselves.

Many of P'eng Shu'tse’s comrades were jailed or executed by Chaing Kai-sheck. P'eng Shu'tse spent a number of years in prison under Chaing Kai-sheck himself and was only released after a Japanese bomber destroyed the prison he was in.

Yet while Mao and the CCP had the luxery of Soviet aid to bolster their movement by paying their full time party cadre and writers for much of the time from the 1920s to the 1949 revolution, the Trotskyist movement always stayed a lesser party despite their superior program, because they never had foreign aid. Mao was even able to make gains during the Japanese occupation while he was capitulating to the hated leadership of Chaing Kai-sheck, while at the same time the Trotskyist movement that had been mostly jailed before the Japanese invasion was paralyzed by their small size and Japanese oppression during the occupation.

After the defeat of Japan the Chinese Trotskyist group once again grew in size and was about 350 people at the time that Mao was on the verge of seizing power. Knowing they were not large enough to do much in the coming revolution, and knowing what kind of oppression other Stalinist regimes had carried out against Trotskyists in eastern Europe, the party’s last meeting before the 1949 revolution made a decision that all prominent Trotskyists should leave the country and that those that the CCP members did not know should join the CCP.

P’eng Shu’tse and Ch’en Pi-lan moved to Hong Kong where the Trotskyist movement was also being hunted and persecuted by the British. The oppression they faced there forced them to then immigrate to Vietnam. In Vietnam comrades of theirs were under attack from the Vietnamese communists so P’eng Shu’tse and Ch’en Pi-lan were then forced to immigrate to Europe where they continued to be active around the issues of China in the Trotskyist Fourth International.

Some members who stayed behind in China were rounded up in the night by the PRC government with their entire families. Many were never seen again. Others were released from prison in 1976.

The Chinese Communist Party in Power

From exile P’eng Shu’tse continued to speak and organize on the issue of China. He held the position that an undemocratic Stalinist government had taken power in China with the 1949 revolution, and while he saw many improvements for the Chinese people come from that regime, he was highly critical of the leadership of Mao Tse-tung.

In the early years, among other things, P’eng Shu’tse criticized Mao for not holding real elections, for suppressing the freedom unleashed by his earlier slogan of “Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom�, for the horrible and predictable failure of the “Great Leap Forward� and its attempts modernize China by producing useless steel in backyard furnaces, for the forced collectivizations that he saw as copying the methods of Stalin’s same project with both causing unecessary hardship amongst the peasants as well as having a horrible impact on food production.

In his analysis of these events P’eng Shu’tse saw an opposition open up within the CCP to Mao’s ultra-left adventurist failures that forced Mao’s resignation in 1958. The leadership Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping, Chen Yun, Peng Zhen, Bo Yibo were then forced to deal with correcting Mao’s mistakes. They ended the production of backyard steel, restored private plots of land in the countryside, personal ownership of livestock, and the free market in the countryside. Even where collective farming can be more efficient, it will never be unless it done on terms that the peasants enjoy. The peasants greeted these reforms with enthusiasm and production increased. By 1963 food production had risen to levels that ended the famine caused by Mao’s policies.

In the international arena P’eng Shu’tse also felt that Mao was also discredited in 1965 with a U.S. backed coup d’etat in Indonesia that left half a million Communists dead. The Communists were close allies of Mao and P’eng Shu’tse saw this as a repeat on a larger scale of Mao’s policy of subordinating the national, worker, and peasants struggle to the bourgeoisie just as Mao had done with the Koumintang. Some party members also blamed this defeat on the CCP’s influence, with P’eng Chen stating, “Everyone is equal before the truth, and if Chairman Mao has made some mistakes he should be criticized.�

After this further setback for the prestige of Mao, Mao proceeded to organize the so-called “Cultural Revolution� to regain power. Mao used sections of the military as well as highschool aged youth organized as “Red Guards� to launch a civil war against intellectuals that had criticized Mao as well as large sections of the leadership of the CCP that were fed-up with the leadership of Mao. This was a coup d’etat carried out by Mao against the collective leadership of the CCP that was supposed to be the proper channel of discussion. Mao did not feel he could get his way through the CCP.

In response to Mao’s coup, many local leaders organized their own youth groups to fight back against the Red Guards, as well as turning to military units loyal to them, and even mobilizing workers on their behalf. Ultimately, however, Mao was successful in his power grab through violence that ushered in the reign of terror of the gang of four. In 1976 Mao died and the Gang of Four went on trial. Like his mentor Stalin, Mao had managed to silence his opposition and get rid of all of the leaders that had fought beside him to make the 1949 Revolution.

The 1949 revolution, among other things, made major advances in women’s rights, healthcare, and education for the people of China. Yet the legacy of the gains made by the Chinese people through the 1949 revolution must always be tempered by a knowledge of the crimes of Mao.

I think that P'eng Shu'tse would have given up a long time ago if he didn’t have a strong love for the truth and for the people combined with an overwhelming optimism. As a revolutionary socialist he did not feel that the Stalinist system was an inevitable product of socialist revolution, but that the money and popular influence of Stalinism at a certain point in history caused China and Eastern Europe to repeat the mistakes of the Soviet Union. There is no reason for future revolutions to repeat those same mistakes.

I think that today P'eng Shu'tse would also oppose the headlong jump of China into capitalism under the continued brutal rule of the CCP and instead advocate the road to democratic socialism in China.

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