We fully agree with the Communist International's resolution on
China. There is no doubt that China is still at the stage of the
bourgeois-democratic revolution. The programme for a thorough democratic
revolution in China comprises, externally, the overthrow of imperialism so as
to achieve complete national liberation, and, internally, the elimination of
the power and influence of the comprador class in the cities, the completion of
the agrarian revolution in order to abolish feudal relations in the villages,
and the overthrow of the government of the warlords. We must go through such a
democratic revolution before we can lay a real foundation for the transition to
socialism. In the past year we have fought in many places and are keenly aware
that the revolutionary tide is on the ebb in the country as a whole. While Red
political power has been established in a few small areas, in the country as a
whole the people lack the ordinary democratic rights, the workers, the peasants
and even the bourgeois democrats do not have freedom of speech or assembly, and
the worst crime is to join the Communist Party. Wherever the Red Army goes, the
masses are cold and aloof, and only after our propaganda do they slowly move
into action. Whatever enemy units we face, there are hardly any cases of mutiny
or desertion to our side and we have to fight it out. This holds even for the
enemy's Sixth Army which recruited the greatest number of "rebels"
after the May 21st Incident. We have an acute sense of our isolation which we
keep hoping will end. Only by launching a political and economic struggle for
democracy, which will also involve the urban petty bourgeoisie, can we turn the
revolution into a seething tide that will surge through the country.
Up to February this year we applied our policy towards the petty
bourgeoisie fairly well. In March the representative of the Southern Hunan
Special Committee arrived in Ningkang and criticized us for having leaned to
the Right, for having done too little burning and killing, and for having
failed to carry out the so-called policy of "turning the petty bourgeois
into proletarians and then forcing them into the revolution", whereupon
the leadership of the Front Committee was reorganized and the policy was
changed. In April, after the whole of our army arrived in the border area,
there was still not much burning and killing, but the expropriation of the
middle merchants in the towns and the collection of compulsory contributions
from the small landlords and rich peasants in the countryside were rigorously
enforced. The slogan of "All factories to the workers", put forward
by the Southern Hunan Special Committee, was also given wide publicity. This
ultra-Left policy of attacking the petty bourgeoisie drove most of them to the
side of the landlords, with the result that they put on white ribbons and
opposed us. With the gradual change of this policy, the situation has been
steadily improving. Good results have been achieved in Suichuan in particular,
for the merchants in the county town and other market towns no longer fight shy
of us, and quite a few speak well of the Red Army. The fair in Tsaolin (held
every three days at noon) attracts some twenty thousand people, an attendance
which breaks all previous records. This is proof that our policy is now
correct. The landlords imposed very heavy taxes and levies on the people; the
Pacification Guards [21] of Suichuan levied five toll charges along the seventy-li road
from Huangao to Tsaolin, no farm produce being exempt. We crushed the
Pacification Guards and abolished these tolls, thus winning the support of all
the peasants as well as of the small and middle merchants.
The Central Committee wants us to issue a political programme
which takes into account the interests of the petty bourgeoisie, and we for our
part propose that the Central Committee work out, for general guidance, a
programme for the whole democratic revolution which takes into account the
workers' interests, the agrarian revolution and national liberation.
A special characteristic of the revolution in China, a country
with a predominantly agricultural economy, is the use of military action to
develop insurrection. We recommend that the Central Committee should devote
great effort to military work.
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