ABSTRACT
As the Chinese national revolution intensified during 1925 and 1926, China’s importance in the eyes of the Soviet leadership soared-to the point where the Chinese national revolution was proclaimed by some as the most important hope for the future of world revolution. Because of China’s large geographical size and immense population, it was thought that a successful nationalbourgeois revolution could potentially disrupt the capitalist countries and might even deliver their long-awaited death blow. Perhaps what the Bolsheviks had failed to accomplish so far in Europe could be accomplished in Asia. With so much riding on the ultimate success or failure of the Comintern’s
actions in China, marked differences of opinion soon arose over the formation and execution of this policy. The intensity of these debates-both in the Soviet Union and in China-threatened to tear the Bolshevik party apart and was fated to cause similar turmoil later on within the United Front between the Guomindang and the Chinese Communist Party. As important as these debates were at the time, however, it is difficult to piece together all of the relevant arguments, mainly because in the aftermath of Stalin’s victory all dissenting opinions were repressed, and many of the publications discussing the China question were either destroyed or relocated to restricted archives. As this chapter will show, between mid-1925 and early 1926, a large number
of opinions appeared in the Soviet press, and most importantly in the pages of the main Comintern journal, Communist International, attempting to evaluate policy goals and to devise proper methods in order to bring the Chinese revolution to fruition. To begin with, the two major “schools” of thought on China included those who supported the continuation of the United Front policy in China unchanged and those critics who claimed that China’s position as an Asiatic state meant that it was not yet ready for a socialist revolution; by extension; this meant that the United Front policy was ill-timed and could lead only to failure. The first group was initially led by Joseph Stalin and Nikolai Bukharin-
and, later, by Stalin alone-and were often referred to as the “Centrists.” The second group eventually included Leon Trotsky, Karl Radek, and Gregory Zinoviev under the name “United Opposition.” The intense intraparty debate over the China question, although initially of a scholarly and
academic nature, would prove to have important long-term repercussions in both countries. This chapter will outline some of the earliest debates over the Comintern’s China policy during 1925-26, debates that preceded and eventually helped to create the United Opposition.
