Introduction to “Resolution on the Chinese Civil War”
This is an adopted document of the Chinese section of the Fourth International, carried by its Central Standing Committee five months before the Guomindang closed the organisation’s paper, twenty months before the organisation split, and just under six years before almost everyone who voted for it was arrested. We have not found it cited anywhere in the English-language literature, and so far as we can establish it has not appeared in English before. It is a key document in the defence of the Chinese Trotskyists against misleading criticism from the Spartacists.
We went looking for it because of a sentence in somebody else’s article. In August 2026 the International Communist League published an account of the Fourth International after the war which disposed of the Chinese Trotskyists in a single clause: that they advocated a ceasefire in the civil war and actually opposed the victory of the Communist forces. No date, no organisation named, no source. Chasing that claim through the Chinese archives led to a reference in Peng Shuzi’s political report to his party’s founding congress of September 1948, where he names this resolution as one of the two basic political documents of the postwar period and says it determined the organisation’s basic attitude to the civil war. It was sitting on the Chinese Marxists Internet Archive, in an old character encoding that defeats an ordinary search.
Read it and the sentence falls apart in a particular way, which is why the document is worth having in English rather than merely being reported on.
The first half of the charge is true. Section nine instructs the organisation’s members in Guomindang territory to raise the slogan of an unconditional ceasefire and to support every anti-war and peace movement of the masses. That is a ceasefire demand, adopted as policy, in February 1947, and this document is the evidence for it.
The same section says something the charge does not carry. It places the organisation’s sympathy in the civil war with the peasant forces led by the Communists. It declares publicly that however reactionary the Communist leadership, certain of its reform policies are progressive, and that peasants defending those gains act justly. And it instructs members in the liberated areas to stand with the peasants, without hesitation, and resist the Guomindang’s offensive.
The two instructions are in consecutive clauses, joined contrastively, and they are divided by territory. Take up arms beside the peasants where the Communists hold ground. Agitate for a ceasefire where Chiang Kai-shek does. That is a single policy with two faces, and which face a member saw depended on which side of the front line he was standing on. Reported without the territorial clause, it becomes the sentence in Spartacist.
Two further things are worth knowing before reading.
The document was adopted by one of two Chinese Trotskyist organisations, and sections thirteen and fourteen are a sustained attack on the other. The two men named there by their pen names, Yiyin and Liangen, are Zheng Chaolin and Wang Fanxi, who between them wrote most of the Chinese Trotskyist record that survives. So this is a party line and a denunciation of the movement’s two most productive writers in the same document, twenty months before the formal split. Anyone reading it as the view of Chinese Trotskyism as such will be reading it wrongly. It is one faction’s view, and the faction it attacks had by the autumn of 1946 abandoned the peace framing entirely and was telling the Communists to make a deeper revolution and win.
And its central forecast was wrong. The resolution treats the Communist military campaign as an adventure without a way out, degenerated by comparison with the Jiangxi period, and holds that no peasant struggle can succeed unless linked to a revival of the urban workers’ movement. Within two and a half years the peasant armies had taken the country. Whatever else this document is, it is not a prophecy that came true.
We publish it because it is evidence, not because we agree with it. Red Mole holds no brief for the ceasefire slogan, for the National Assembly as the road to peace, or for the tone taken here toward Zheng Chaolin and Wang Fanxi. What we object to is a movement being described in a sentence by people who have not read what it wrote.
On 22 December 1952 the party whose peasant war this resolution had extended its sympathy to arrested two or three hundred Chinese Trotskyists. Zheng Chaolin served twenty-seven years and came out in 1979, having spent thirty-four years of his life in prison under two governments. Wang Fanxi reached Macau and then Leeds, where he died in 2002. Peng Shuzi died in exile in 1983.
A note on the translation. The English began as a machine-assisted draft and is not the work of a professional translator. It was corrected by Gregor Benton, who has translated Zheng Chaolin and Wang Fanxi into English and who settled three disputed readings, and it was then read in full and approved by a native Chinese speaker. One term remains contested between them on how best to express in English: 政學系, given here as the Political Study Clique, a centre-right grouping of politicians and professionals dating from the 1920s which lobbied the Guomindang on the principle that experts should govern. Corrections are welcome and will be published. The Chinese original is at marxists.org, in the Fourth International’s Chinese documents section, dated 13 February 1947.Resolution on the Chinese Civil War
(1) The present civil war in China reflects not only the contradiction between America and the Soviet Union, and the historic conflict between the Guomindang and the Communist Party, but chiefly the widespread and deep hatred of the ruling class among the people, created and accumulated by the Guomindang’s reactionary policies over the eight years of the war of resistance.
(2) The war against Japan had barely ended when the Guomindang rulers suddenly found that they had lost the people’s allegiance across “Free China”, and had rapidly drawn the people’s resentment even in the “recovered areas”. With the material base unprecedentedly weakened by the war, China’s rulers grew ever more rapacious, overbearing and lacking in confidence. They plundered the people’s wealth without restraint, seizing entirely into the hands of individual bureaucrats or of cliques what the people had won by eight years of bloodshed, such as the enemy property, with the greater part concentrated in a small upper layer of officials, so that the so-called monopoly capital of the five great bureaucratic families swelled up overnight. The result was that on a ruined and steadily shrinking material base, the Guomindang rulers’ policy of plunder produced not only unprecedented despair and discontent among an impoverished people longing for a settled life, but great and complicated conflicts of interest and centrifugal tendencies within the bourgeoisie and among the rulers themselves. Chiang Kai-shek’s rule had never faced a situation as isolated and as dangerous as it did after the war.
(3) From this we can understand why, during the war of resistance and especially soon after it ended, the vast mass of ruined and starving peasants preferred to support the Stalinist party’s feeble programme of rural reform, while the urban petty bourgeoisie, represented by the intellectuals, and the workers sympathised with its half-hearted democratic slogans. The growth of the Stalinist party’s armed forces and political influence is entirely a product of the Guomindang’s excessive rottenness, and at the same time of China’s lack of a powerful revolutionary party. There is no need to draw on past historical experience: its policy and leadership themselves prove sufficiently that it is a degenerate and hopeless petty-bourgeois party. More than once it has used the faith the Chinese masses place in it as political capital for bargaining with the bourgeoisie at critical historical moments. Its opposition to the bourgeoisie is not aimed at overthrowing it but at rescuing it by means of reform. This is Moscow’s philosophy, and it is equally the philosophy of Yan’an: the illusion that reform can ease the tension between the bourgeoisie and American imperialism on one side and the Chinese masses and the Soviet Union on the other. The class root of this philosophy is of course the petty bourgeoisie. Every inconstant vacillation, betrayal and shameless policy comes from there.
(4) China’s civil war situation over the past year has been produced chiefly by the complex social contradictions described above. When the war of resistance had just ended the situation had these features. The ruling class was unprecedentedly isolated, unstable and riven by internal feuding, and its state power was greatly weakened. On the other side, nearly half of China had fallen under the armed control of the Stalinist party, and the broad peasantry along with urban students and workers had conceived illusions in the Yan’an regime. Not only the student movement, of which Kunming was the representative, but workers’ economic strikes flourished for a time, winning in part the demand for wages indexed to the cost of living. Even in Guomindang-ruled territory there were continual scattered peasant disturbances against corruption, against grain requisitioning and against the press-ganging of conscripts. These conditions constituted a marked situation on the eve of revolution. Had the Stalinist party then been a genuinely revolutionary party, the only conclusion it could have drawn from that situation would have been to launch a broad political offensive and place the seizure of power on the order of the day, since history has never shown that dual power can coexist for long, being only the expression of class conflict at its highest tension.
(5) Unhappily this situation was thrown away, first through Mao Zedong’s compromise negotiations at Chongqing and the Kremlin’s shameful betrayal of the Chinese people by way of the Sino-Soviet Treaty, and then through the empty paper of the Political Consultative Conference, in which the so-called Democratic League and the other intermediate parties amply proved themselves mere instruments for luring the Stalinist party into surrender. Thereafter every round of compromise and negotiation demonstrated that the Guomindang was systematically exploiting the vacillation and betrayal of the Stalinist party’s upper layers, gradually converting a favourable pre-revolutionary situation into a reactionary one. The Guomindang moved from defence to offensive not only militarily but politically, and we are living through that shameful stage still.
(6) Today, a year on, the situation we face has become this. The Stalinist party has gone over entirely to hopeless struggling and military adventure, and politically has reached a dead end, hoping only that a policy of delay will bring on a greater crisis of Guomindang rule and international joint intervention, the Kremlin’s intervention naturally included. The Guomindang for its part has gained the decisive initiative militarily and politically, and its state power has become somewhat more stable. It has gained that advantage by two means: on one side by exploiting the dependence on the big bourgeoisie of the petty-bourgeois parties, the Stalinist party and its satellite the Democratic League, whose highest product was the Political Consultative Conference; and on the other by exploiting the Guomindang’s own dependence on American imperialism, whose highest product was the Sino-American Commercial Treaty and large-scale American material aid.
(7) This unhappy and hopeless deadlock has produced a marked and general change in the mood of the masses. They are not only increasingly repelled by and resentful of the Guomindang rulers; disappointment with the Stalinist party’s leadership, and a critical spirit toward it, have also gradually grown. This deep change of mood shows itself in the masses’ urgent search for a new way out, and many recent signs and facts demonstrate it. Even within the bourgeoisie, represented by the Political Study Clique’s Ta Kung Pao, the slogan of a political realignment has been raised half-consciously. Within the intermediate parties, in the Democratic League and represented by Shi Fuliang, proposals have been made to broaden the League’s lower ranks and to advance an independent programme. A revolutionary organisation must grasp this change in the objective situation and in the mood of the masses in good time, and put forward concrete tactical slogans.
(8) The main tendency of China’s postwar situation is that American imperialism has displaced the other imperialisms and become China’s master. Our general tactical slogan, as Chinese Trotskyists, therefore changes in good time to this: our main enemy is American imperialism and its instrument, the Guomindang. Around that slogan we apply our programme and construct a new tactical line. In every mass struggle that makes it easier to overthrow American imperialism and Guomindang rule we shall stand in the front rank and act jointly with all parties and groupings, and in the course of that joint action expose severely their deceptions, their vacillation and their betrayals.
(9) On this line we of course place our sympathy in the civil war with the peasant forces led by the Stalinist party, and firmly oppose the attempt of the Guomindang landlords to restore the old rural order by armed force. We declare publicly that however reactionary the Stalinist party’s leadership may be, certain reform policies it carries out do carry a progressive significance, and that the peasants’ defence of these meagre gains is of course a just act. Therefore the Trotskyists in the “liberated areas” will not hesitate to stand on the peasants’ side and resist the Guomindang’s reactionary offensive. In the course of that resistance they are to expose the Stalinist party’s compromises and betrayals and change its reactionary policy; while in Chiang Kai-shek’s rear, the Trotskyists raise the slogan of unconditional ceasefire and support every anti-war and peace movement of the masses.
(10) Today, when the civil war has reached a dead end, and when the general population, especially in the Guomindang rear, has grown cold and disappointed toward it and has developed a mood of dissatisfaction with both sides, the slogans of unconditional ceasefire and peace have become the most urgent of demands. This is demonstrated not only by the ruling class’s distorted use of the slogan, but by the systematic use of it by the Stalinist party and the other intermediate parties. But we must point out that when the Guomindang talks peace it is only trying to use this popular mood to justify its “pacification of the internal disorder”, and that when the Stalinist party and other petty-bourgeois parties talk peace they are only trying to disguise the dead end of their military opportunism and political betrayal. We Trotskyists mark ourselves off strictly from their purposes. We tell the masses that the only road to a real peace is the convening of a National Assembly elected by universal suffrage and holding full powers. Such an assembly could not only put an end to the civil war and protect the meagre reforms of the “liberated areas”, but thoroughly solve the land question, achieve genuine national independence with tariff autonomy, improve the people’s livelihood including the eight-hour day, give the people every freedom, withdraw all foreign garrisons from the country, abolish all the new unequal treaties, and bring down American imperialism and its instrument, the military dictatorship of the Guomindang.
(11) The armed peasant struggle led by the Stalinist party is one side of the Chinese people’s struggle against the Guomindang and American imperialism, and that struggle has already degenerated, for want of a correct leadership and of help from the urban workers, into a military adventure without a way out, arousing disappointment and discontent among the people across the wide Guomindang-ruled territory and even in the “liberated areas”. Seen in that light, the revival of the Chinese peasant movement and its way forward evidently still depend on the new condition we have pointed to continually: the revival of the urban workers’ movement. The Stalinist party’s several tragic defeats in the past were chiefly the result of deliberately ignoring that condition. We have therefore never exaggerated the role of the Stalinist party’s peasant forces, and should do so still less today. To place illusions in those forces and inflate their fighting into “the starting point of the revolution” would at best be a pitiful parody of the Stalinist party’s own past exaggeration of the Jiangxi peasant risings into the arrival of a high tide of Chinese revolution. We must replace every petty-bourgeois romantic illusion with Marxist realism, and concentrate all our forces on leading and organising the movement of the urban workers, the poor and the students. Therefore, alongside the armed struggle led by the Stalinist party, we must take part in and support every other spontaneous mass struggle, such as workers’ strikes and students’ anti-American demonstrations, and develop and deepen the class struggle of the Chinese masses.
(12) Recognising the change in the present mood of the masses described above, we must today point out to them, firmly and clearly, the third road in politics, which is to say the Trotskyist road; and organisationally we must do all we can to help the progressive tendencies of centrism among the masses to find organised expression, promoting a mass body capable of containing them, and by that means helping them toward the revolutionary road and toward the Trotskyist party. Whoever abandons this precious historical moment, whoever abandons this difficult task, is a criminal against the revolution.
(13) Two tendencies at present seriously obstruct our work of party-building. One is a sectarian tendency, satisfied simply with reciting socialist and revolutionary phrases, which regards every transitional means of reaching socialism, that is the democratic struggle, as “stageism” and “opportunism”; in practical work those who hold this tendency are always a stumbling block to us. The other is the opportunist tendency contained in centrism and eclecticism, which in every new struggle exaggerates its own role, conceives enormous illusions in it, and so repeatedly accommodates to bourgeois and petty-bourgeois opinion. These two tendencies are most clearly organised in the revisionist grouping of the Xin Qi faction, represented by Yiyin and Liangen. Yiyin holds that “China was socialist from the outset”, and abuses our theory of permanent revolution as “stageism”. Liangen exaggerates the role of the Stalinist party’s military opportunism and conceives illusions in it, and goes so far as to praise extravagantly such petty-bourgeois politicians on the Stalinist party’s periphery as Ma Xulun and Tao Xingzhi, whitewashing them and spreading illusions on their behalf. Liangen’s opportunist accommodation of course does not begin today; it is an organic political development running from the beginning of the war of resistance until now. These two harmful tendencies have undoubtedly already produced, and will go on producing, continual echoes inside our immature organisation. For that very reason we must redouble our vigilance and root them out attentively and resolutely, which is an unavoidable and painful part of building the new party.
(14) We note in particular that over the past year, within our organisations in every locality, those isolated individuals unable to influence or educate the masses have for the most part been organically linked in their thinking to the Xin Qi faction, and have been the most sensitive in reacting to criticism of them. What such elements have in common is this: incapacity in work, permanent enclosure in an isolated environment, an inability to educate comrades within or to influence the masses without, and, in political thought, a hopeless emptiness and confusion. Their temper is solitary and self-satisfied, consoling their own souls by looking down on everything. Out of this grows the sectarian spirit that dazzles others and drugs itself with fine revolutionary phrases, when in fact that sectarian spirit is merely the ornament of political incapacity. Such isolated elements can resist no alien class idea or pressure from outside. They never hold a stable political and class position, are forever wavering, forever lacking patience, forever sunk in a despairing discontent, and forever, out of that despair, unconsciously trusting to miracles and submitting to petty-bourgeois or bourgeois opinion.
From this in turn grows an opportunist tendency which strains to magnify the role of the Stalinist party’s peasant forces and the significance of its “reformism”, and which goes so far as to claim that the Stalinist party’s present military opportunism surpasses in historical role the land revolution of the Jiangxi period, and is the starting point of the third revolution, and so on. In fact this new armed peasant struggle, set against the land revolution of the past, is in the development of history only a degenerated and suppressed movement; and in political and social effect no peasant struggle, whatever its depth and breadth, has of itself any way out, unless it is linked in good time with the emancipating struggle of the urban working class. In a backward petty-bourgeois country such as China, modern history is full of petty-bourgeois struggles, those of the peasants, the urban poor and the students, but they have always failed for want of the leadership of the urban workers. The Stalinist party’s greatest crime is to have made a theory out of this defect, which necessarily invites defeat. Now there are actually people in our own ranks who have forgotten the tradition of decades of Trotskyist theoretical struggle and have become, quite openly, the echo of the Stalinist party, treating a degenerated Stalinist movement of rural reform and military adventure as the rise of a new revolution, under conditions of economic decay and of a working class lacking organisation and leadership. This is absurd self-deception. We should strike thoroughly at this spineless opportunist tendency and point out to the Chinese people, firmly and without minding repetition, that only the third road indicated by the Trotskyist programme is the way out; that only the revival of the working-class movement can open a new prospect; and that in the end only a new Marxist party can guarantee the victory of the Chinese revolution. Without an independent political road there is no basis for building a party, and without an independent Marxist party there is no successful revolution. Whoever does not recognise this, let him stand aside.
Adopted by the Central Standing Committee of the Chinese Communist League, 13 February 1947
Translated for Red Mole.
In Defence of the Chinese Trotskyists
TL;DR The Spartacists’ new history of the Fourth International gives the Chinese Trotskyists one sentence: they wanted a ceasefire in the civil war and opposed the Communist victory. No date, no organisation, no source. We went to the Chinese archives. Half of it is true. One of the two Chinese Trotskyist organisations did adopt an unconditional ceasefi…
Names as they appear. The Stalinist party is the Chinese Communist Party. The liberated areas are the Communist-held territories, in the resolution’s own scare quotes. Yan’an was the Communist wartime capital. The Political Consultative Conference of January 1946 was the negotiating body set up under the American mediation of General Marshall. The Democratic League was the principal grouping of the intermediate parties. Yiyin and Liangen are pen names of Zheng Chaolin and Wang Fanxi, whose paper was Xin Qi, New Banner. The Jiangxi period refers to the Communist rural base areas of 1929 to 1934.