A Place In The Sun

Marxism And Fascimsm In China's Long Revolution

A. James Gregor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429983191
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica asiatica

China has endured a century of turmoil, beginning with the anti-dynastic revolution associated with Sun Yat-Sen, through the military and tutelary rule of Chiang Kai-shek, the revolutionary regime of Mao Zedong, and the radical reforms of Deng Xiaoping. China has had little respite. Historians and social scientists have attempted to understand some of this history as being the consequence of the impact of European ideologies-including Marxism, Marxism-Leninism, and Fascism. Rarely instructive or persuasive, the discussions regarding this issue have, more often than not, led to puzzlement, rather than enlightenment.In A Place in the Sun, A. James Gregor offers an interpretation of the role of European Marxist and Fascist ideas on China's revolutionaries that is both original, and based on a lifetime of scholarship devoted to revolutionary ideologies. Gregor renders a detailed analysis of their respective influence on major protagonists. In the exposition, Gregor reveals an unsuspected and complex set of relationships between the Chinese revolution and essentially European ideologies. His discussion concludes with a number of estimations that suggest implications for the future of modern China, and its relationship with the advanced industrial democracies. How post-Dengist China-the world's most populous nation-is to be understood remains uncertain to most comparativists and historians. Gregor provides one well supported alternative, and he is carefully attentive to the implications of this alternative.

1
On Understanding the Twentieth Century

The twentieth century was a time of unmitigated horrors. Two world wars and political oppression unknown in the history of humanity, together with the wholesale murder of innocents that accompanied that oppression, seemed to confound the reasoning faculties of some of our most competent thinkers. Right reason seems to have been unable to fathom it all. In the end, many were left with very little confidence that they understood what had in fact transpired.

In looking backward, we recall a time when intellectuals welcomed the Bolshevik revolution as a promise of liberation for the wretched of the earth. It was a time when Beatrice and Sidney Webb could somehow see in the harrowing dictatorship of the Bolsheviks anticipations of a “new democratic civilization”—and in the fabrication of Stalin’s elephantine bureaucracy the “withering away” of the state.¹

Somehow or other, in the confusion of the time, thinkers convinced themselves that the political universe sorted itself into left-wing and right-wing movements and regimes—the first characterized by humanity, democracy, and an abiding concern for the poor, underprivileged, and exploited, the second animated by a pathological commitment to dictatorship, uniforms, violence, and death.² It did not seem to matter that the left-wing dictatorships of Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong³ had murdered millions of “class enemies.” Many academics continued to believe in the moral superiority of left-wing regimes and the pathological destructiveness of those on the Right. The pretended differences were offered in the effort to explain what was happening in our time.

For much of the century, the intellectual’s world of politics was parsed into evil fascisms as opposed to virtuous antifascisms—a sustained conflict between the purveyors of darkness and the champions of light.⁴ Even as the century closed, some academics could still speak of Marxism as a “core project” of the Enlightenment, with fascism its unregenerate opposite.⁵

Beneath all of this, there was a persistent suspicion that something was very wrong with the prevailing analyses. Irrespective of the persistence of faith in the Left and Right distinction, there were, by the end of the century, those who argued that the Bolshevik revolution, initially welcomed as the realization of the goals of the Enlightenment, had quickly devolved into a synthesis of “revolutionary radicalism with the most ferocious nationalism” so that by the early 1930s, “the affinity between Soviet ideology and, in general, authoritative fascist types of ideologies was apparent to many.”⁶ The putative differences between the Fascism of Mussolini⁷ and the “Marxism” of Stalin no longer appeared as real as they once did. The distinction between the Left and the Right no longer seemed to provide any serious assistance in coming to understand what caused the twentieth century to develop as it did.⁸

Clearly, theorizing about the twentieth century and the dynamics that governed its fateful evolution had not produced much of persuasive significance. Marxist and fascist regimes shared much in common. However counterintuitive to many academics, Marxist and fascist regimes shared a family resemblance captured in the concept “totalitarianism.”⁹ As a consequence, it became more and more obvious to more and more academics that much of what had been offered to account for the century’s revolutionary history had to be reassessed.

Many academics rejected the notion that the major revolutionary movements and regimes of our time could be distinguished along a continuum from Left to Right. More and more of them conceived the politics of the century in terms of broad “democratic” and “antidemocratic” polities rather than in terms of movements and regimes of the Left and Right. Some began to suggest that a better grasp of left-wing movements and regimes might be obtained through the study of fascist movements and regimes.¹⁰ The comparative study of both would contribute to a deeper comprehension of each.

A similar suggestion has made fitful appearance among Western Sinologists. Distinctions of Left and Right have been employed in almost every contemporary interpretive history of the Chinese revolution. Today the conviction that the ideology of Sun Yat-sen and the Kuomintang was of the Right, whereas that of Mao was of the Left, is no longer as persuasive as it was once thought to be. Considered in that light, the history of China’s long revolution takes on an entirely different complexion.

For most of the century, Sinologists regularly divided China’s postdynastic history into that of the “reactionary” governance by Sun Yat-sen’s Kuomintang nationalists as opposed to the “truly revolutionary” governance of the “Marxists” of Mao Zedong. Because the notion that the “reactionary Right” was devoid of intellectual content had become part of the folk wisdom of political science and history, the ideology of Sun was dismissed without serious reflection.¹¹ Chinese Communism, on the other hand, as heir to the rich doctrinal traditions of the Left, was the subject of an avalanche of volumes devoted to its explication. Even the diaphanous “thought of Mao Zedong” was treated to sober analysis.¹²

There has never really been a systematic treatment of either Sun or Mao as right- and left-wing revolutionaries—and as a consequence, there was never any general agreement on what was “truly revolutionary” in either. Everyone, on the other hand, seemed certain that Maoism was worlds apart from the ideology of Sun and the regime of Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang. As a consequence, we enter the twenty-first century without any clear idea of how to intellectually deal with the China that has emerged after the passing of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping.¹³ Sinologists are uncertain how to understand the post-Maoist “socialism with Chinese characteristics” that now occupies the world’s attention.

For the one who takes a cue from the most recent studies of Soviet Marxism, as a movement and a regime, and is prepared to entertain the possibility that Marxism and fascism have never been intrinsically opposed revolutionary movements and regimes, the impact on the interpretation of the long Chinese revolution is of major consequence. It is no longer seen as a Manichean struggle between darkness and light, or reaction and revolution. All the major revolutionary forces that shaped contemporary Chinese history are conceived of as sharing some critical properties throughout their common history The shared properties provide a hitherto unexpected continuity to the entire complex sequence of events that began with the revolution of 1911 and ended with the appearance of Deng’s “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”

What is missing from our present treatments of China’s long revolution is some account that might credibly relate what we know of Sun’s nationalist revolution to the revolutionary Marxism of Mao and Deng. That would contribute to our understanding of how the ideologies and the institutionalized features of both bring to mind the ideologies and institutions of Mussolini’s Italy and Stalin’s Soviet Union.

Some tentative suggestions concerning such an account have been offered in the past.¹⁴ It has been argued that the features of the fascist and Marxist regimes are a function of the demand—made by less-developed nations vegetating on the periphery of the Great Powers—for rapid economic growth and industrialization. A productive and sophisticated economic base was calculated to assure them the resources and power projection capabilities necessary for their survival and prevalence. All of that, in turn, was understood to be a consequence of an abiding sense of inefficacy and humiliation among those in nations that find themselves in unequal contest with those more industrially advanced.

The present effort attempts to relate all this to major cultural, economic, military, and psychological features of twentieth-century life in marginalized countries. Out of a common source, responses emerged that shaped much of the history of our time. Identifying those responses and tracing their effects is the purpose of the present effort.

The Origins of Imperialism

The outward expansion of the industrialized and industrializing powers of northwestern Europe in the nineteenth century is generally spoken of as “imperialism” or “colonialism.” In general, the term “imperialism” is taken to mean “the extension of sovereignty or control, whether direct or indirect, political or economic, by one government, nation or society over another.”¹⁵

Although imperialism is not a uniquely European occurrence, no other imperialism in history has exercised such influence over as broad an expanse of territory or over so many human beings. In that sense, the imperialism of northwestern Europe has been unique.

In the case of European imperialism, the most significant phase of European outward expansion began in the eighteenth century. Great Britain and Holland assumed the colonizing role previously played by Spain and Portugal. By the end of the nineteenth century, France, Germany, Belgium, Russia, Japan, and the United States were involved in the process.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the colonial powers had established claims to about 28 million square miles, or 55 percent, of the earth’s surface. By the advent of the First World War, selected Western nations had increased their holdings to more than 43 million square miles, or 84.4 percent, of the globe’s entire territory.¹⁶

France laid claim to 4.25 million square miles, or 37 percent, of the African continent; Great Britain to much of the remainder. Spain seized the Rio de Oro, the “Spanish Sahara,” and Portugal laid claim to Angola and Portuguese East Africa. Belgium established its colony in the Congo. In East Asia, Portugal was the pioneer, seizing the island of Macao from China in 1557, and Great Britain and the Netherlands followed.

British colonies in Asia ultimately included India, Ceylon, Burma, Hong Kong, and Malaya. Holland acquired the Dutch East Indies, the islands of Sumatra and Java, the Celebes, Moluccas, Bali, Borneo, and the Timor Archipelago. France colonized Indochina: Cochin-China, Amman, Cambodia, Tonking, and Laos, while the Russians acceded to the control of Sakhalin Island and territories in Northeast Asia. The United States, late to the process, acquired the Philippine Islands as a result of the Spanish–American War of 1898–1899.

Although it seems evident that the Christian imperative to proselytize played an important role throughout the phases of European expansion,¹⁷ it remains reasonably clear that trade and enterprise provided still another motive that drove early European exploration and the search for territory

With the onset of the industrial revolution and the rise of entrepreneurial capitalism in northwestern Europe, trade and investment loomed ever more emphatically as a force of outward expansion. J. A. Hobson made the case, in 1902,¹⁸ that inequitable income distribution in the industrialized economies produced a lack of effective demand in the domestic market, creating a glut of commodities at one end of the chain of production, and a surfeit of investment capital at the other. The consequence was a frenetic search for both market supplements and opportunities for profitable capital investments wherever they might be found. Industrial capitalism, as an economic force, impelled the Western nations to venture beyond their confines, seeking not only foreign markets for the sale of their excess produce but also virgin territories hospitable to the employment of their excess capital.

All of this was left to the thinkers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to fathom. For those of the first half of the nineteenth century, before the full impact of imperialism had manifested itself, the issue was to attempt to explain the persistence of poverty and oppression in the industrializing nations at a time of extraordinary growth and increasingly liberal thought. For those of the beginning of the twentieth century, on the other hand, questions arose that turned on the reality of “civilized” nations enjoying every competitive advantage vis-à-vis those less-developed—an issue of relative economic and industrial development.

Marxism

Classical Marxism, the Marxism of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, was formulated in an effort to explain why the modern world was still host to poverty and oppression at a time when humankind seemed, to all appearances, fully capable of producing unlimited welfare benefits. For Marx and Engels, the world of the mid-1800s had demonstrated a productive capacity that, in principle, could satisfy all material human needs. Industrialization, the substitution of machine power for human muscle, had long since broken through the productivity ceiling that had typified human activity since the establishment of fixed-site agriculture. Organized industrial efforts were capable of more and more amply meeting the needs of humankind. Nonetheless, the modern world suffered poverty and oppression, and Marx and Engels sought to explain the anomaly.

Marx and Engels were Eurocentric in their search for a convincing account. They sought to explain the phenomena of poverty amid potential plenty that they witnessed in the Europe of their time. They attempted to explain the destitution of urban dwellers in London¹⁹ and Paris. They sought to account for the poverty of Western Europeans in economic circumstances that saw the awesome rise of industrial production.

The Communist Manifesto of 1848 was written to illuminate why the workers of Europe were compelled to endure poverty while the economic system to which they gave their labor had demonstrated a capacity to produce an “infinity” of material goods, fully capable of satisfying their every want. Marx and Engels devoted the remainder of their lives to accounting for just that curiosity....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 On Understanding the Twentieth Century
• 2 Marxist Theory and Fascism in Republican China
• 3 Fascism and Sun Yat-sen
• 4 Marxism, Maoism, Fascism, and the Kuomintang
• 5 Maoism, the Ideology of Sun Yat-sen, and Fascism
• 6 Post-Maoist China, Sun Yat-sen, and Fascism
• 7 The New Nationalism of Post-Maoist China
• 8 Fascism, Post-Maoist China, and Irredentism
• 9 Conclusions
• Index