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Artesian wrote: >Or we can read a few things before we engage >in combat-- like Isaacs' Tragedy of the Chinese >Revolution, and/or Trotsky's Problems of >the Chinese Revolution, available on the >Marxist Internet Archive. This is a very thin reading list comrade, to engage in such serious combat as consigning the Chinese revolution to oblivion because of the events of 1927. The statement, too, that "we all know what happened to the united front" implies a simplistic polemical certainty to something as complex as 20th century Chinese history. I am not sure at all what we are all supposed to know. On the way to the fight, here are a few more readily available works: Enemies and Friends: The United Front in Chinese Communist History by Lyman Van Slyke (Stanford) Origins of the Chinese Revolution, 1915-1949 by Lucien Bianco (Stanford) Power Relations Within the Chinese Communist Movement: A Study of Documents By Tso-Liang Hsiao (Univ. of Washington) The Foundations of Mao Zedong’s Political Thought, 1917-1935 by Brantly Womack (Univ. Hawaii) I guess I am supposed to believe that here was indeed an authentic Chinese communist movement rooted in the Shanghai proletariat which was utterly and totally destroyed in the fateful year of 1927. The blame for this is because no one was listening to Trotsky at the time and therefore Stalin proved the utter futility of the United Front for all time. The United Front with the QMD would surface again during the war with Japan but by this time the revolutionary movement was lead by Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party was no longer communist because the Red Army was composed of peasants. The simplified narrative above is easy to remember and argue ad nauseum, but it has yet to convince me. I do not doubt for a second that Stalin & the Comintern made a whokle serious of catastrophic errors as outlined in Stalin's Failure in China by Conrad Brandt. I am also aware that before the United Front with Sun Yat Sen, the Communist Party was an insignificant sect and after this alliance it became a national political force with a strength of 60,000. Half of the cadre survived the slaughter initiated by Jiang and what emerged from the cauldron of the next eight years was a movement that was able to organize, lead, and involve millions to make a revolution There is a great deal of study that needs to be done on 1927. I am hopeful that as a new generation of Chinese historians come to the US and publish in English there will be more work available on the level of The Long March: The True Story of Communist China's Founding Myth by Sun Shuyun. Work such as this has the ability to illuminate this subject better than a library of ideologically driven polemics. ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: [email protected] Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
