note

8. In November and December 1936, big strikes broke out among 45,000 workers in twenty-six Japanese and Chinese-owned textile mills in Shanghai. In December all the workers of the Japanese-owned textile mills in Tsingtao struck in sympathy. The Shanghai workers won their strike, their wages were increased five per cent retrospectively from November, and the employers undertook not to sack workers arbitrarily or assault or abuse them. But the strike in Tsingtao was suppressed by Japanese marines.

9. Britain and the United States began to change their attitude towards Japan and exerted some influence on the Chiang Kai-shek government in its policy towards Japan after Japanese imperialism occupied Shanhaikuan and penetrated into northern China in 1933, and especially after the conclusion of the "Ho-Umezu Agreement" (see Note I, p. 276) in 1935, which directly jeopardized their imperialist interests in northern and central China. During the Sian Incident of 1936, Britain suggested rejection of Japanese demands prejudicial to British interests in China and even intimated that, provided the Chiang Kai-shek government maintained its rule over the Chinese people, it would not be a bad thing for it to "form some sort of alliance with the Communist Party" so as to deal a blow to the Japanese policy of aggression.

10. In June 1936, Li Tsung-jen and Pai Chung-hsi, warlords of Kwangsi, and Chen Chi-tang, warlord of Kwangtung, jointly declared their opposition to Chiang Kai-shek under the pretext of "resisting Japan and saving the nation". In August their opposition mated away before Chiang Kai-shek's tactics of bribery and divide and rule.

11. The Japanese forces and puppet troops began to invade Suiyuan in August 1936. In November, the Chinese troops there fought back and the people throughout the country started a movement in support of their fight.

12. After the "Ho-Umezu Agreement" of 1935, the Nanking Kuomintang government took a firmer attitude towards Japan under the pressure of the people's rising anti-Japanese sentiment and under the impact of the stiffer policy the British and U.S. imperialists were adopting towards Japan. The Kuomintang government used stalling tactics in the negotiations with Japan from September to December 1936, which ended without result.

13. This was the meeting of the Central Executive Committee of the Kuomintang on February 15,1937 after the peaceful settlement of the Sian Incident.

14. Ah Q is the leading character in The True Story of Ah Q, the famous nova by the great Chinese writer Lu Hsun. Ah Q typifies all those who compensate themselves for their failures and setbacks in real life by regarding them as moral or spiritual victories.

15. In the stage of China's bourgeois-democratic revolution, the Communists agreed with the basic points of Sun Yat- sen's programme and co-operated with him, which did not mean that they agreed with the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois world outlook or ideological system of which he was the exponent. As the vanguard of the Chinese proletariat, the Chinese Communists had an entirely different world outlook or ideological system and theoretical approach to the national and other problems, from those of Sun Yat-sen,

16. Reorganized by Sun Yat-sen in 1924, the Kuomintang became a revolutionary alliance of several classes, which members of the Communist Party joined in their individual capacity. After its betrayal of the revolution in 1927, the Kuomintang carried out what it called a "party purge" throughout the country, butchering the Communists and many of its own left-wingers who genuinely supported Dr. Sun Yat-sen's Three Great Policies. From then on the Kuomintang became the counter-revolutionary political party of the big landlords and big bourgeoisie.

17. This refers to the situation created by the opportunist leadership of the Central Committee of the Party in the first half of 1927.