NOTES
[1]
The Twenty-one Demands on the Yuan Shih-kai government were presented by the Japanese imperialists on January 18, 1915. On May 7, they sent an ultimatum demanding a reply within forty-eight hours. The demands were divided into five parts. The first four contained the following: to transfer to Japan the rights Germany had seized in Shantung and to grant Japan additional rights in the province; to grant rights to the Japanese to lease or own land in southern Manchuria and eastern Mongolia and to establish residence, engage in industrg and commerce, and have exclusive railway building and mining rights there; to reorganize the Han-Yeh-Ping Iron and Steel Company as a joint Sino-Japanese enterprise; and to undertake not to lease or cede any harbours or islands along China's coastline to any third power. The fifth part contained demands that Japan should control China's political, financial, military and police affairs and should build vital railway lines connecting the provinces of Hupeh, Kiangsi and Kwangtung. Yuan Shih-kai accepted all the demands except those in the fifth part, about which he pleaded for "further negotiations". Thanks to the unanimous opposition of the Chinese people, Japan failed to get her demands implemented.
[p. 153]
[2]
Yuan Shih-kai was the head of the Northern warlords in the last years of the Ching Dynasty. After the Ching Dgnasty was overthrown by the Revolution of
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1911, he usurped the presidency of the Republic and organized the first government of the Northern warlords, which represented the big landlord and big comprador classes. He did this by relying on counter-revolutionary armed force and on the support of the imperialists and by taking advantage of the conciliationist nature of thc bourgeoisie then leading the revolution. In 1915 he wanted to make himself emperor and, to gain the support of the Japanese imperialists, accepted the Twenty one Demands with which Japan aimed at obtaining exclusive control of all China. In December of the same year an uprising against his assumption of the throne took place in Yunnan Province and promptly won country-wide response and support. Yuan Shih-kai died in Peking in June 1916.
[p. 153]
[3]
The Nine-Power Conference in Washington was called by the U.S. government in November 1921; China, Britain, France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Portugal and Japan were invited. It was a struggle between the United States and Japan for hegemony in the Far East. On February 6, 1922, a nine-power treaty was concluded on the basis of the principle, advanced by the United States, of the "open door" or "equal opportunities for all nations in China". The aim of this treaty was to create a situation in which the imperialist powers had joint control of China and it actually cleared the way for exclusive domination by the U.S. imperialists, the purpose being to frustrate Japan's plans for exclusive domination.
[p. 153]
[4]
On September 18, 1931, the Japanese "Kwantung Army" in northeastern China seized Shenyang. Under Chiang Kai-shek's order of "absolute non-resistance", the Chinese troops at Shenyang and elsewhere in the Northeast (the Northeastern Army) withdrew to the south of Shanhaikuan, and consequently the Japanese forces rapidly occupied the provinces of Liaoning, Kirin and Heilungkiang. This act of Japanese aggression has become known as the "September 18th Incident".
[p. 154]
[5]
The "four northeastern provinces" were then Liaoning, Kirin, Heilungkiang and Jehol, which correspond to the present Liaoning, Kirin and Heilungkiang Provinces, the northeastern part of Hopei Province north of the Great Wall and the eastern part of the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region. After the September 18th Incident, the Japanese invaders occupied Liaoning, Kirin and Heilungkiang and later, in 1933, seized Jehol.
[p. 154]
[6]
At the instigation of the Japanese, a puppet regime called the "Eastern Hopei Anti-Communist Autonomous Administration" was established in twenty-two counties in eastern Hopei by the Kuomintang traitor Yin Ju-keng on November 25, 1935. This became known as the Eastern Hopei Incident.
[p. 154]
[7]
The diplomatic talks between the Chiang Kai-shek government and the Japanese government discussed the so-called "Three Principles of Hirota", i.e., the "Three Principles for Dealing with China" put forward by Japanese Foreign Minister Hirota, namely, (1) suppression by China of all anti-Japanese movements; (2) establishment of economic co-operation between China, Japan and "Manchukuo"; and (3) joint defence by China and Japan against communism. On January 21, 1936, Hirota told the Diet that the Chinese government "has accepted the three principles proposed by the Empire".
[p. 154]
[8]
The year 1935 witnessed a new upsurge in the popular patriotic movement throughout the country. Students in Peking, under the leadership of the Communist Party of China, held a patriotic demonstration on December 9, putting forward such slogans as "Stop the civil war and unite to resist foreign aggression" and "Down with Japanese imperialism". This movement broke through the long reign of terror imposed by the Kuomintang government in league with the Japanese invaders and very quickly won the people's support throughout the country. It is
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known as the "December 9th Movement". The outcome was that new changes manifested themselves in the relations among the various classes in the country and the Anti-Japanese National United Front proposed by the Communist Party of China became the openly advocated policy of all patriotic people. The Chiang Kai-shek government with its traitorous policy became very isolated.
[p. 154]
[9]
At the time of this report Chiang Kai-shek, after selling out the Northeast to Japan, was selling out northern China while actively keeping up his fighting against the Red Army. Therefore the Chinese Communist Party had to do its best to expose him as a traitor, and naturally he was not included in the Anti-Japanae National United Front proposed by the Party. But already in this report Comrade Mao Tse-tung mentioned the possible disintegration of the camp of the Chinese landlord and comprador classes as a rault of the contradictions among the imperialist powers. And Japan's attack on northern China did subsequently lead to serious clashes of interest between Japanese and Anglo-American imperialism. The Chinese Communist Party maintained that the Chiang Kai-shek clique, with its close ties with Anglo-American imperialist interests, might change its attitude to Japan at its masters' bidding, and therefore it adopted the policy of compelling Chiang Kai-shek to resist Japan. On its return to northern Shensi from Shansi, in May 1936 the Red Army appealed directly to the Nanking Kuomintang government for an end to the civil war and for united resistance to Japan. In August of the same year, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party addressed a letter to the Kuomintang's Central Executive Committee, calling for the formation of a bi-partisan united front against Japan and negotiations between the representatives of both parties. But Chiang Kai-shek rejected these proposals. It was not until December 1936 when Chiang Kai-shek was detained in Sian by Kuomintang army officers who favoured alliance with the Communists against Japan that he was compelled to accept the Communist Party's demand for ending the civil war and resisting Japan.
[p. 155]
[10]
Tsai Ting-kai was deputy commander of the Kuomintang's 19h Route Army and commander of one of its corps, the two other leaders being Chen Ming-shu and Chiang Kuang-nai. This army, which had fought the Red Army in Kiangsi, was transferred to Shanghai after the September 18th Incident. The mounting anti-Japanese tide of the people in Shanghai and the whole country had a great impact on the 19th Route Army. When the Japanese marines attacked in Shanghai during the night of January 28, 1932, the Army and the people of Shanghai put up a joint resistance. However, the battle was lost through the treachery of Chiang Kai-shek and Wang Ching-wei. Later, on Chiang's orders, the 19th Route Army was transferred to Fukien to fight the Red Army again. But the leaders of the Army gradually came to realize the futility of such fighting. In November 1933, allying themselves with Kuomintang forces under Li Chi-shen and others, they publicly renounced Chiang Kai-shek, established the "People's Revolutionary Government of the Republic of China" in Fukien, and concluded an agreement with the Red Army to resist Japan and oppose Chiang Kai-shek. The 19th Route Army and Fukien People's Government collapsed under the attacks of Chiang's troops. From then on, Tsai Ting-kai and others gradually moved towards a position of co-operation with the Communist Party.
[p. 156]
[11]
Feng Yu-hsiang, together with the forces under his command in Suiyuan Province, announced his break with the Northern warlord clique and joined the revolution when the revolutionary Northern Expeditionary Army reached Wuhan in September 1926. Early in 1927, his troops moved in from Shensi to attack Honan Province in co-ordinadon with the Northern Expeditionary Army. Although Feng
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participated in anti-Communist activities following the betrayal of the revolution by Chiang Kai-shek and Wang Ching-wei in 1927, there was always a clash of interests between him and the Chiang Kai-shek dique. After Japan invaded China on September 18, 1931 he favoured resistance and in May 1933 co-operated with the Communist Party in forming the people's Anti-Japanese Allied Army in Changchiakou. His efforts came to naught in August under the pressure of both Chiang Kai-shek's forces and the Japanese invaders. In his later years Feng continued to co-operate with the Communist Party.
[p. 156]
[12]
An uprising took place at Ningu, Kiangsi in December 1931 within the Kuomintang's 26th Route Army, which was sent by Chiang Kai-shek to attack the Red Army in Kiangsi Province. Led by Comrades Chao Po-sheng and Tung Chen-tang, more than ten thousand officers and men rose up and joined the Red Army in response to the Communist call for resistance to Japan.
[p. 157]
[13]
Ma Chan-shan was an officer of the Kuomintang's Northeastern Army whose troops were stationed in Heilungkiang. He and his men fought the Japanese invaders who drove towards Heilungkiang via Liaoning after the September 18th Incident.
[p. 157]
[14]
Hu Han-min, a well-known Kuomintang politician, was an opponent of Dr. Sun Yat-sen's policy of co-operation with the Chinese Communist Party and was Chiang Kai-shek's accomplice in the counter-revolutionary coup d'etat of April 12, 1927. Later he fell out with Chiang in a struggle for power and was held in detention by the latter. Set free after the September 18th Incident, he left Nanking for Canton where he instigated the warlords of Kwangung and Kwangsi to oppose Chiang Kai-shek's Nanking government for a considerable period of time.
[p. 158]
[15]
The Six-Point Programme for Resisting Japan and Saving the Nation was the "Chinese People's Basic Programme for Fighting Japan" put forward by the Chinese Communist Party in 1934 and published over the signatures of Soong Ching Ling (Mme. Sun Yat-sen) and others. The programme consisted of the following points: (1) mobilize all sea, land and air forces to fight Japan; (2) mobilize the people throughout the country; (3) arm all the people; (4) confiscate the property of the Japanese imperialists in China and of the traitors to defray war expenditure; (5) establish an all-China committee for national armed defence, to be elected by the representatives of workers, peasants, soldiers, students and businessmen; and (6) form an alliance with all the forces opposed to the Japanese imperialists, and establish friendly relations with all countries observing benevolent neutrality.
[p. 158]
[16]
These warlords were Chen Chi-tang of Kwangtung and Li Tsung-jen and Pai Chung-hsi of Kwangsi.
[p. 158]
[17]
The Chiang Kai-shek gang of bandits described the revolutionary people as "bandits" and their armed attacks upon and massacre of the revolutionary people as "bandit suppression".
[p. 158]
[18]
Comrade Jen Pi-shih was a veteran member of the Chinese Communist Party and one of its first organizers. He was a member of the Party's Central Committee from its Fifth National Congress in 1927 onwards. He was elected to the Political Bureau at the Fourth Plenary Session of the Sixth Central Committee in 1931. In 1933 he served as secretary of the Provincial Party Committee of the Hunan-Kiangsi Border Area and concurrently as political commissar of the Sixth Army Group of the Red Army. When the Sixth and Second Army Groups joined forces and formed the Second Pront Army, he was appointed its political commissar. He was Director of the General Political Department of the Eighth Route Army in the first years of the War of Resistance. In 1940 he began to serve in the Secretariat of the Party's
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Central Committee. At the First Plenary Session of the Seventh Central Committee in 1945 he was again elected a member of the Political Bureau and of the Secretariat. Comrade Jen Pi-shih died in Peking on October 27, 1950.
[p. 159]
[19]
The Sixth Army Group of the Chinese Workers' and Peasants' Red Army, originally stationed in the Hunan-Kiangsi border area, broke through the enemy's siege and shifted its position in August 1934 on the orders of the Party's Central Committee. In October it joined forccs with the Second Army Group led by Comrade Ho Lung in eastern Kweichow, and together they formed the Second Front Army of the Red Army and created the Hunan-Hupeh-Szechuan-Kweichow revolutionary base area.
[p. 159]
[20]
In October 1934 the First, Third and Fifth Army Groups of the Chinese Workers' and Peasants' Red Army (that is, the First Front Army of the Red Army, also known as the Central Red Army) set out from Changting and Ninghua in western Fukien and from Juichin, Yutu and other places in southern Kiangsi and started a major strategic movement. In traversing the eleven provinces of Fukien, Kiangsi, Kwangung, Hunan, Kwangsi, Kweichow, Szechuan, Yunnan, Sikang, Kansu and Shensi, crossing perpetually snow-capped mountains and trackless grass lands, sustaining untold hardships and frustrating the enemy's repeated encirclements, pursuits, obstructions and interceptions, the Red Army covered 25,000 li (12,500 kilometres) on this march and finally arrived triumphantly at the revolutionary base area in northern Shensi in October 1935.
[p. 159]
[21]
The Red Army in the Szechuan-Shensi border area was the Fourth Front Army of the Chinese Workers' and Peasants' Red Army. In March 1935, it shifted from its base in the Szechuan-Shensi border area to the borders of Szechuan and Sikang Provinces. In June, it joined forces with the First Front Army in Maokung in western Szechuan and advanced northward by two routes, a right route and a left route. But on arriving in the Maoerhkai area near Sungpan in September, Chang Kuo-tao of the Fourth Front Army led the troops on the left route in a southward direction, in defiance of the Central Committee's orders, thus causing a disruption in the Red Army. The Second Front Army, which had broken through the enemy's siege and left the Hunan-Hupeh-Szechuan-Kweichow border area, arrived at Kantze, Sikang Province, in June 1936 via Hunan, Kweichow and Yunnan, and there it joined forces with the Fourth Front Army. Acting against Chang Kuo-tao's wishes, the comrades in the Fourth Front Army resumed the shift northward together with the Second Front Army. In October, the entire Second Front Army and a part of the Fourth Front Army arrived in northern Shensi and succeeded in joining forces with the First Front Army.
[p. 159]
[22]
Chang Kuo-tao was a renegade from the Chinese revolution. Speculating on the revolution, he joined the Chinese Communist Party in his youth. In the Party he made many mistakes and ended by committing grave crimes. Most notoriously, in 1935 he opposed the Red Army's northward march, advocating a defeatist and liquidationist withdrawal by the Red Army to the minority-nationality areas on the Szechuan-Sikang border, and he engaged in openly traitorous activities against the Party and the Central Committee, established his own bogus central committee, disrupted the unity of the Party and the Red Army, and caused heavy losses to its Fourth Front Army. Thanks to patient education by Comrade Mao Tse-tung and the Central Committee, the Fourth Front Army and its numerous cadres soon came back under the correct leadership of the Central Committee and played an honourable part in subsequent struggles. Chang Kuo-tao, however, proved incorrigible, escaped
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by himself from the Shenti-Kansu-Ningsia Border Region in the spring of 1938 and joined the Kuomintang secret police.
[p. 159]
[23]
The Central Red Army, or the First Front Army, refers to the Red Army that was built up in the Kiangsi-Fukien area directly under the leadership of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party.
[p. 159]
[24]
Pan Ku, according to Chinese mythology, was the creator of the world and the first ruler of mankind. The Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors were legendary rulers in ancient China.
[p. 160]
[25]
In July 1935, the Kuomintang troops started their third "encirclement and suppression" campaign against the Shensi-Kansu revolutionary base area. The 26th Army Corps of the Northern Shensi Red Army routed two enemy brigades in the eastern sector and drove the enemy to the east of the Yellow River. In September, the 25th Army Corps of the Red Army, which had been operating in the Hupeh-Honan-Anhwei base area, joined forces with the Northern Shensi Red Army after arriving in northan Shensi via southern Shensi and eastern Kansu, and together they formed the 15th Army Group of the Red Army. In the Kanchuan-Laoshan campaign, this army group wiped out most of the enemy 110th Division, killed its divisional commander and in a subsequent action destroyed four battalions of the enemy's 107th Division at Yulinchiao, Kanchuan County. The enemy organized new attacks and put Tung Ying-pin (an army corps commander of the Northeastern Army) in command of five divisions, which mounted an attack along two routes; the division on the east route drove northward by way of Lochuan and Fuhsien and the other four divisions on the west route drove along the Hulu River towards Fuhsien, northern Shensi, via Chingyang and Hoshui in Kansu. By October, the Central Red Army reached northern Shensi. In the following month the Central Red Army and the 15th Army Group jointly wiped out the enemy's 109th Division in Chihlochen, southwest of Fuhsien, and eliminated one regiment of the enemy's 106th Division at Heishuisze in the course of pursuit. Thus the enemy's third "encirclement and suppression" campaign against the Shensi-Kansu border area was completely smashed.
[p. 160]
[26]
When the main forces of the Red Army in southern China shifted position during 1934-35, they left behind some units to operate as guerrillas. These guerrilla units held out in the following fourteen base areas in eight provinces: southern Chekiang, northern Fukien, eastern Fukien, southern Fukien, western Fukien, northeastern Kiangsi, the Fukien-Kiangsi border, the Kwangtung-Kiangsi border, southern Hunan, the Hunan-Kiangsi border, the Hunan-Hupeh-Kiangsi border, the Hupeh-Honan-Anhwei border, the Tungpai Mountains in southern Honan and Hainan Island off the coast of Kwangtung.
[p. 161]
[27]
After the Japanese imperialists occupied the Northeast in 1931, the Chinese Communist Party called upon the people to put up armed resistance. It organized anti-Japanese guerrilla units, formed the Northeastern People's Revolutionary Army and rendered assistance to various volunteer forces fighting the enemy. In 1934, under the leadership of the Party, all these forces were reorganized into the single Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army, with the outstanding Communist Yang Ching-yu as Commander-in-Chief. This army kept up anti-Japanese guerrilla war in the Northeast for a long time. The anti-Japanese guerrilla war in eastern Hopei refers to the peasant uprising against Japan there in May 1935.
[p. 161]
[28]
The revolutionary war led by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union refers to the fighting from 1918 to 1920 in which the Soviet people beat off armed interven-
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tion by Britain, the United States, France, Japan, Poland, etc., and suppressed the White Guard rebellion.
[p. 163]
[29]
The political power and the policies of a people's republic, as here enunciated by Comrade Mao Tse-tung, were made a reality in the people's Liberated Areas under the leadership of the Communist Party during the War of Resistance. That was why the Party was able to lead the people behind the enemy lines in waging a victorious war against the Japanese invaders. After Japan's surrender, the Third Revolutionary Civil War broke out. As the war went on, the area liberated by the people gradually extended to the whole of China, and in this way the unified People's Republic of China was born. Thus Comrade Mao Tse-tung's ideal of a people's republic was eventually realized throughout the country.
[p. 165]
[30]
The Sixth National Congress of the Communist Party of China held in July 1928 adopted the following Ten-Point Programme: (1) overthrow imperialist rule; (2) confiscate foreign capitalist enterprises and banks; (3) unify China and recognize the right of the nationalities to self-determination; (4) overthrow the Kuomintang warlord government; (5) establish a government of councils of workers, peasants and soldiers; (6) institute the eight-hour day, increase wages, and establish unemployment relief and social insurance; (7) confiscate the land of all landlords and distribute the land among the peasants; (8) improve the living conditions of the soldiers, give land and jobs to ex-soldiers; (g) abolish all exorbitant taxes and miscellaneous levies and adopt a consolidated progressive tax; and (10) unite with the world proletariat, unite with the Soviet Union.
[p. 168]
[31]
Originally an anti-Leninist faction in the Russian working-class movement, the Trotskyite group later degenerated into a downright counter-revolutionary gang. In his report to the plenary session of the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U.(B.) in 1937, Comrade Stalin explained the course this group of renegades had run as follows [Transcriber's Note: Stalin's report was published in the United States under the title "Mastering Bolshevism". -- DJR]:
In the past, seven or eight years ago, Trotskyism was one of such political trends in the working class, an anti-Leninist trend, it is true, and therefore profoundly mistaken, but nevertheless a political trend. . . . Present-day Trotskyism is not a political trend in the working class, but a gang without principle and without ideas, of wreckers and diversionists, intelligence service agents, spies, murderers, a gang of sworn enemies of the working class, working in the pay of the intelligence services of foreign states.
After the failure of the Chinese revolution in 1927, a small number of Trotskyites appeared in China, too. Ganging up with Chen Tu-hsiu and other renegades, they formed a small counter-revolutionary clique in 1929 and spread such counter revolutionary propaganda as that the Kuomintang had already completed the bourgeois-democratic revolution, and they became a dirty imperialist and Kuomintang instrument against the people. The Chinese Trotskyites shamelessly joined the Kuomintang secret service. After the September 18th Incident, to fulfil the order given by the criminal renegade Trotsky "not to impede the occupation of China by imperial Japan", they began collaborating with Japanese secret agents, received subsidies from them and engaged in all kinds of activities facilitating Japanese aggression.
[p. 169]
[32]
This quotation is from Mencius. Mencius made this remark because in the period known as the Spring and Autumn Era (722-481 B.C.) the feudal princes of China incessantly fought one another for power.
[p. 170]
[33]
Faced with the opposition of the Chinese people to her traffic in opium, Britain sent forces in 1840-4 to invade Kwangtung and other coastal regions of China, under the pretext of protecting trade. Led by Lin Tse-hsu, the troops in
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Kwangtung fought a war of resistance. A "Quell-the-British Corps" which was spontaneously organized by the people of Canton also dealt the British aggressors severe blows.
[p. 171]
[34]
The War of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom was a peasant revolutionary war in the middle of the 19th century against the feudal rule and national oppression of the Ching Dynasty. In January 1851 Hung Hsiu-chuan, Yang Hsiu-ching and other leaders of this revolution staged an uprising in Chintien Village of Kueiping County in Kwangsi and proclaimed the founding of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. In 1852 the peasant army, proceeding northward from Kwangsi, marched through Hunan, Hupeh, Kiangsi and Anhwei and in 1853 captured Nanking, the main city on the lower Yangtse. A part of the forces then continued the drive north and pushed to the vicinity of Tientsin. However, the Taiping army failed to build stable base areas in the places it occupied, and also, after establishing its capital in Nanking the leading group in the army committed many political and military errors; therefore it could not withstand the combined onslaught of the counter-revolutionary forces of the Ching government and of the British, U.S. and French aggressors, and it was finally defeated in 1864.
[p. 171]
[35]
The Yi Ho Tuan War was the vast spontaneous movement of the peasants and handicraftsmen in northern China in 1900. Forming themselves into mystical secret societies, these peasants and handicraftsmen carried on armed struggle against the imperialists. But the movement was put down with indescribable savagery, and Peking and Tientsin were occupied by the joint forces of eight imperialist powers.
[p. 171]
[36]
For the Revolution of 1911, see "Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan", Note 3, p. 56 of this volume.
[p. 171]
[37]
See V. I. Lenin, "The War Programme of the Proletarian Revolution", Collected Works, Russ. ed., Moscow, 1950, Vol. XXIII. See also History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks), Short Course
, Chapter 6, Section 3.