New book on China long on facts but short on insight

Scan page 14

"Despite Salisbury's efforts to portray Mao as an antl-Stalinist rebel, the best evidence Indicates that Mao endorsed Stalinist policy." 4 SOCIALIST ACTION JANUARY 1986 BOOK REVIEW The Long March, the Untold Story, by Harrison E. Salisbury. Harper and Row, New York, 1985, $22.35.

Harrison Salisbury, a veteran New York Times correspondent and author, has written a number of popular books about various aspects of Russian and Chinese history. His new book, "The Long March, the Untold Story," is a politically naive, yet gripping account of a thin slice of Chinese revolutionary struggle: the year-long, 6000-mile Communist retreat from Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang (KMT) armies from October 1934 to October 1935.

Salisbury interviewed as many survivors of the Long March as he could find. He also retraced the route of the march and recounted the survivors' stories about life during the Cultural Revolution. Particular attention is paid to the role played by China's current leader, Deng Xiaoping.

Salisbury notes in the preface that the Long March was not a defeat or a victory, not really a march or a campaign, but a unique period of struggle and sacrifice that became symbolic of the determination and, in a sense, the righteousness, of socially necessary change-much like what Valley Forge was to America's bourgeois revolution or the storming of the Winter Palace was to the Russian proletarian revolution.

This book is well worth reading at several different levels. On the one hand, it is a well-written adventure story, with the physical hardships of the Long March graphically detailed. It also documents the political intrigues Mao faced with both the Stalinized Communist International (Comintern) and one of his own army commanders, Zhang Guotao, who, as head of the Communist Fourth Army, defied Mao's orders and nearly came into combat with Mao's First Army. Zhang eventually defected to the KMT.

On the other hand, readers with more political awareness will appreciate some of the new historical and personal infor -mation that Salisbury has obtained.

Essentially, the book is a sympathetic biography of Mao Zedong with a be -labored (and unrealistic) explanation of why this "hero" all of a sudden turned into the villain who almost "destroys" China during the Cultural Revolution.

Mao didn't become psychotic or wasn't consolidating his power, Salisbury argues, Stalin (above), Mao (right)

analysis of the events it describes. Most readers, whatever their political beliefs, want to understand historical events in some context. They need to know or argue about "why" things happen.

The source of the tragedy of the Long March, I believe, did not arise in China, but in the Soviet Union in 1922 when Lenin became gravely ill and Stalin gained control of the Russian Communist Party and the Comintern.

Almost immediately, the degeneration of both the internal and foreign policies of the Soviet Union began. This led from Lenin's uncompromising internationalism to Stalin's theory of "socialism in one country," which subordinated extension of the world revolution to the defense of the narrow interests of the new bureaucratic caste in power in the Soviet The effect of these changes, probably first evidenced in Germany in 1923, postponed the Chinese Revolution from 1927 till 1949, caused untold suffering, and eventually created a Chinese workers' state that was bureaucratically deformed from the outset.

Thus, I believe, Mao's purges and seemingly destructive policies toward his own Chinese Revolution (as well as others he helped sabotage-like Indonesia) should be understood in terms of his acceptance of Stalinist politics and not, as Salisbury thinks, because of his Buddhist background.

Despite Salisbury's efforts to make Mao an anti-Stalinist rebel, the best evidence KMT but ruied out a programmatic bloc with this capitalist formation.) Mao, for example, who was the organizational secretary of the CCP's central committee, left his party duties and worked full time for the KMT Shanghai executive headquarters.

So, in five short years, the lessons of the Russian Revolution were gone. The old Menshevik idea that semi-feudal countries with "uneven development" would have to pass through a capitalist stage of development before a socialist revolution was possible became dominant in the Comintern.

Having adopted this "stagist" theory of revolution, it was only logical for the CCP to support the "best" or most "progressive" movements, even if these were controlled by the mortal enemy of the workers—the capitalist class.

The subsequent events in China should be carefully examined by those who still accept this Menshevik policy.

Despite its revolutionary rhetoric, the KMT quickly discovered that its conflict with the workers was much more important than its conflict with the foreign imperialists. This became clear when, in May and June 1925, Chiang Kai- shek took sides with the British troops that fired at Chinese workers in Shanghai, Canton, and Hong Kong.

As early as March 1926, Chiang started purging Communists in his KMT. The CCP tried to argue and scold Chiang (the Comintern kept sending emissaries to Chiang to "straighten out" the problems) but never, apparently, considered leaving.

Finally, as was predictable, the first of many massacres began. In early 1927 more than 100,000 Communist-led workers began strikes and demonstrations in Shanghai. The insurrection was at hand. It was a virtual reenactment of Petrograd in 1917, except that the workers were not armed and the Communist troops were in the wrong (KMT) army!

Thousands of workers and, then, CCP troops were slaughtered. In fact, the Red Army led by Mao was born as small bands of Communist soldiers fled south to Jiangxi province.

The price of defeat The working class lost all confidence in the CCP and was never again represented in the party in any meaningful way. The "Red" armies were almost entirely of peasant composition. They fought hero -ically but almost entirely in remote provinces far from the working class.

Political decisions were almost entirely dictated by the Comintern and the politics never changed. As late as 1949 the Comintern was still counseling Mao to maintain his political alliance with Chiang, which had been reestablished to fight the Japanese during World War II.

After the December 1927 Fifteenth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party all debate about the Chinese question stopped. Dissenters in the Comintern faced expulsion, arrest, and, in many cases, death. Ch'en Tu-hsiu, the CCP's founder and first general secretary, sided with Trotsky and the Left Opposition and was instantly victimized. (Ch'en later spent many years in the jails of the Kuomintang.)

Soon thereafter, the CCP became more of an army than a political party. Like its counterpart in the Soviet Union, it became committed to "peaceful coexistence" with the imperialist powers and to stifling internal dissent.

The defeat of the 1927 revolution, I believe, is what led to the Long March. The Stalinization of the CCP, which the party never overcame even after over -throwing capitalism, is also what helps explain the purges of the Cultural Revolution and the CCP's sabotage of the indigenous revolutions in Indonesia and Ceylon. Finally, it is what continues to explain Deng's present accommodation toward U.S. capitalism.

mass organizations of the people.