[Translation]: The Near Impossible Road of the Chinese Revolution (1)

Original link: https://wmdpd.com/zhuan-zhong-guo-ge-ming-de-jin-hu-bu-ke-neng-zhi-lu-yi/

The main historical task of China since modern times has been the self-help of the Chinese people, and the method of self-help is revolution. However, the revolution’s self-rescue is faced with enormous difficulties and complicated situations, and the victory of the Chinese revolution has actually taken an almost impossible road . Here we first analyze the profound predicament of the Chinese revolutionary self-rescue movement, and then explain the extraordinary features of the Chinese revolutionary road.

One of the dilemmas of revolution China in modern history is faced with the problem of falling behind two or three technological revolutions one after another

Neither the first nor the second technological revolution, China has kept pace. At the end of modern history, the third technological revolution represented by nuclear technology and computers also began to emerge. Repeatedly lagging behind the technological revolution and resulting in the accumulation of backwardness has made China’s road to self-rescue rather difficult and even more and more dangerous.

With the iterative upgrading of the technological revolution, the relative strength of the major powers facing China has become more and more terrifying . This is the cruel situation faced by the Chinese revolution, and it is also a basic reason why China’s revolutionary strength and organizational capacity have been continuously upgraded but repeatedly hit hard. The first powers were mainly Britain and France, and their behavior was mainly to occupy some ports, to ask for some privileges and indemnities, and to kill on a small scale. Later, Japan’s ambitions far exceeded that of Britain, France and Russia, which annexed a large number of territories, and even wanted to annex most of China and made great progress. Although there are geographical conveniences here, it is also inseparable from technological development, such as the military technology upgrade described below. Going forward, just as Japan showed far more interference power than Britain and France in dealing with China, the United States and the Soviet Union were also more powerful than Japan in the past.

A typical example is the development of military capabilities. From the Qing Dynasty before the Sino-Japanese War to the Beiyang warlords, from the Beiyang warlords to the National Revolutionary Army, it should be said that China’s military power has experienced substantial improvement more than once. But if we look at the record of foreign wars, it is not optimistic. At the end of the 19th century, the powers still lacked the ability to annex most of China (or at least lacked the determination, and this lack of determination had a lot to do with their judgment of ability). By the early 1940s, Japan, which belongs to the third rank among the great powers at most, already had the ability to occupy most of China’s populated areas.
The ability to control the vast majority of cities in the occupied area and build a large puppet army. It can be seen that with at least two rounds of substantial progress in China’s military capabilities, the gap with the world’s military is likely to widen. This is the cruelty that has been repeatedly left behind by the technological revolution. What is even more cruel is that in the late 1940s, the United States and the Soviet Union entered the era of nuclear weapons and missiles one after another, and a new round of military technological change came.

No less than military pressure is the unprecedented economic output and economic system construction capabilities of the United States and the Soviet Union brought about by the advantages of volume and technological revolution. This is incomparable to Britain, France and Japan . The Marshall Plan in the late 1940s, the economic take-off of Japan in the 1950s, the rise of the Four Little Dragons later, the establishment of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European Economic Cooperation Association and its stable operation for a considerable period of time, the Soviet Union’s control of the Republic in the 1950s Cases such as systemic industrial output are clearly reflected. This also means that the United States and the Soviet Union may both have the strength, military and economic, to put one or half of a loose and weak China into their own system and control them deeply for a long time.

Being repeatedly left behind by the technological revolution has created another serious problem: China’s economic and cultural development is highly uneven.

In the first half of the 20th century, Shanghai was already a super metropolis in the Far East, where intellectuals could easily access the world’s cutting-edge ideology and culture, while the vast majority of the country was still in abject poverty and closed rural areas where illiteracy was widespread. Such serious internal imbalances can easily lead to vertical splits within ethnic groups due to differences in class, culture, economic model, etc. This kind of tearing can easily make the general public, who accounts for the majority of the population, distrust the few elites who have access to advanced productive forces and advanced culture, and it is also easy for the few elites to voluntarily or even be forced to leave the general public and really want to take root. The elites who mobilize the masses by the masses often have to turn back history in terms of cultural and political ideas to ensure that they can be grounded. It is very difficult for an organization to represent advanced productive forces, advanced culture and the interests of the broadest people at the same time.

The reason why many developing countries and late-industrialized countries have not completely succeeded in their revolution in modern times, or even suffered a severe setback after their success, is inseparable from the serious tear brought about by this internal imbalance of development. This is a transformational problem under the conditions of the global technological revolution, which cannot be solved by India, the Middle East, and Latin America.

The second dilemma of the revolution The external challenge that China has faced since modern times is an all-round civilizational shock.

It took people in the Qing Dynasty to gradually realize that China lags behind the West in all aspects of military, economy, science and technology, and politics. This kind of civilizational shock has never been faced in ancient Chinese history, and it also makes it impossible for China to rely on the rich experience of chaotic governance, dynasty replacement and assimilation of minority groups to deal with this external civilizational challenge.

The all-round leadership and different ethnicity of the West make it impossible for them to be assimilated or partially assimilated. Not to mention that the 19th century to the first half of the 20th century was an era of rampant racism in the West. Once China continues to weaken, there will be no bottom line for Western aggression against China. The full colonization of India is already a good warning. The situation in India only reflects the aggressiveness of the Western powers in the 19th century. By the 20th century, the Nazis had developed to the point where there was a systematic and systematic genocide of industrialization.

Under the strong stimulation of the West, Japan, which successfully rescued itself in a short period of time, also broke out with intensified brutality, and did not show mercy at all because it was of the same species as China’s modern literature. After the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, many Chinese intellectuals were once inspired by the victory of the yellow race, but Japan’s policy in the ten years after its occupation of the Northeast has shown that even if China is willing to integrate itself into the Japanese-led East Asian order of the yellow race , the prospects of the Chinese people, whether elites or the general public, under Japanese rule will be weaker than the prospects of the Han Chinese in the past under the Manchus . The reason is obvious. The reality of being a late-developing country and the lack of local resources has made Japan embark on the path of using nationalism to deeply mobilize its own grassroots for expansion. This deep nationalism mobilization makes it difficult for the Japanese to accept the transfer to China. Interests, and the trend of inferior and superior forces caused by the backward political system has further severely restricted the ability of the Japanese ruling class to unite China.

As early as the beginning of the 20th century, Chinese people of insight had fallen into a state of total loss of self-confidence and panic. The well-known discussion of protecting the country, protecting education and protecting species profoundly reflects their high anxiety. Under the height of anxiety, all kinds of bizarre and deviant ideas have emerged. Even an excellent intellectual like Lu Xun once advocated the demise of Chinese characters. Under the height of anxiety, China’s elites are prone to two serious psychological problems, either fall into complete opportunism, or go to the other extreme and be engraved with some kind of ideological stencil from the (broadly) West. In the modern history of China, the opportunists have been betraying the revolution, and the steel seals have repeatedly caused the revolution to suffer deadweight losses. The Chinese were not only beaten, but also stupefied .

The third dilemma of the revolution The Chinese revolution faces a very complex international political pattern.

During the period of modern history, the world situation was complicated, and the fate of the great powers was also ups and downs. In particular, the 50-year game pattern from the Eight-Power Allied Forces to the Korean War was highly chaotic.

The eight countries of Britain, France, Germany, Austria, Russia, Italy, Japan, and the United States, which participated in the Eight-Power Allied Forces, suffered heavy losses in the status of the other six countries except the United States and the Soviet Union (Russia) after 1945, and some even ceased to exist. The Soviet Union also suffered several extremely heavy blows during the period.

In this highly chaotic international environment, the road of the Chinese revolution’s self-help has always been filled with mist.

The impact of the complex international situation is mainly in two aspects .

First, since there are many powerful foreign powers, China’s self-rescue process will inevitably involve borrowing from abroad, and it is difficult to accurately judge which country to borrow and how to borrow.

The Cixi regime, which was once able to coordinate the relations between the major powers and maintain its own rule, collapsed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Later, the multi-channel warlords tried to use the foreign powers to seek benefits and safety for themselves, and there were many missteps, from Yuan Shikai to Zhang Zuolin. Sun Yat-sen tried to get help from Britain, the United States, and Japan, but he never succeeded. In his later years, the road to get help from Soviet Russia looked promising, but he soon died.

The faction represented by Chiang Kai-shek has long relied on American resources to carry out what they think is the correct way of self-rescue at home. However, after becoming the victor of World War II, it was also in the midst of the rapidly developing U.S.-Soviet Cold War pattern. In the end, it not only failed to coordinate the key relationship with the Soviet Union, but also unexpectedly did not receive timely and strong support from the United States at a critical time. The Chinese Communist Party has been known to suffer serious setbacks in the process of drawing on foreign power.
The promising Soviet state was largely destroyed by the wrongful intervention of Soviet forces.

On the other hand, the chaos of the international situation has also led to a vexing problem of how China learns and what foreign experience to learn . A prominent feature of the Chinese people’s self-rescue movement is the deep use of foreign ideological resources, which began with the Taiping Rebellion. Since modern times in China, the ideological trends of learning from Western Europe, Japan, the Soviet Union, and the United States have each had many supporters, and even in the 1930s, there was a desire to imitate the Nazis. There are too many learning routes, which in itself scatters the power of Chinese revolutionary organization and mobilization, and easily leads to repeated cannibalism among revolutionaries.

Revolutionary Dilemma No. 4 Since modern China, there has been a serious shortage of living resources.

In the late Qing Dynasty, China’s population had exceeded 400 million, a situation that had never occurred in all dynasties. At the beginning of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the population had exceeded 500 million. According to statistics, China’s per capita output of a large number of core material products related to basic people’s livelihood has ranked last in the world since the founding of the People’s Republic of China. This situation seems to be unprecedented in all dynasties.

In fact, the fact that after the establishment of the republic with super-organizational power, China is still facing a very short supply of food all the year round can already explain the problem. Once the unified regime of China’s successive dynasties achieves domestic reunification and peace, they can quickly enter a dividend period in which domestic economic and resource conflicts are greatly alleviated, and living standards can significantly exceed those in the surrounding areas. But modern China is different. The fact that the regimes of the past dynasties can do this has something to do with the massive reduction of the population during the war, the large number of new lands that can be opened up in a peaceful environment, and the fact that China is already an economic and technological highland. However, the situation faced by modern China is that even in the state of war, the population remains high or even grows slowly, while areas suitable for development are basically occupied or face severe ecological damage and severe and high-frequency natural disasters. This leads to the tragic situation of a large number of people with very low life expectancy, and still faces increasingly serious resource scarcity, and even the solution of the first problem will increase the burden of the second problem.

Given the scarcity of its own resources, China, which has long been a low-lying region of the world’s economy and technology, cannot resist the temptation of foreign resources. Since modern times, China has been deeply dependent on foreign resources. This is also a situation that China has never faced when the dynasties changed.

The first is that China relies heavily on foreign countries for its weapons . China lacks the ability to manufacture weapons that are even two generations behind advanced weapons. This at least three-level weapon generation difference makes it easy for the foreign powers to make up their minds to arm the Chinese army. In repeated civil wars, whoever can get foreign weapons ahead of the other side will gain a generational advantage in armament. The second is that China has fallen into a state of deep financial dependence on foreign resources . This started from the end of the Qing Dynasty. This greatly improved the financial status of the late Qing Dynasty, and it also made it extremely difficult for China to get rid of the deep involvement of foreigners in the Chinese economy.

Chiang Kai-shek’s regime is an example of a deep reliance on foreign resources, which is both his strength and weakness. On the other hand, the Communist Party, which finally won the victory, had no way to get rid of its deep dependence on Soviet resources in the early stage and a certain degree of dependence later.

The coexistence of these problems led to the deep contradictions of the Chinese revolution. Even if emerging powers can gain relative stability in a certain region for a period of time to engage in construction and accumulate strength,

It is also difficult to solve the problem of scarcity of survival resources and military resources in a short period of time, and at the same time, it is also faced with huge external military pressure. It is also very dangerous to blindly put military issues in the first place. Just its own maintenance may be crumbling. The later fate of Chiang Kai-shek’s group is a proof.

If you want to develop yourself and then go out, you can’t do it, you can’t rely on expansion to solve economic problems, and if you want to rely on foreign economic resources, you will have endless troubles. How to balance and coordinate construction and expansion, economy and military, short-term pressure and long-term pressure, internal development to tap potential and seeking external resources, this is a comprehensive challenge to the organizer’s ability.

Revolutionary Dilemma No. 5 China’s revolutionary self-rescue movement is faced with profound and intractable ethnic and territorial issues.

The Qing Dynasty itself was a multi-ethnic and multi-system multi-government system. After the collapse of the Qing Dynasty’s rule, half of the territory where a large number of ethnic minorities lived was facing the risk of long-term division and even irreparable damage . Even in the Northeast, where the proportion of Han Chinese was very high, a split regime such as the puppet Manchukuo emerged later. After the collapse of the Qing Dynasty system, the Han Dynasty fell into deep fragmentation . Various warlords often relied on regional resources for mobilization , and the inner circle often engaged in fellowship to improve trust.

This kind of game with a profound geographical background is intertwined with ethnic issues in the frontier, coupled with the intervention of foreign powers and the rise of nationalism and national consciousness around the world, making China’s hopes for a great reunification seem increasingly elusive . As a comparison, we have noticed that in fact other Asian and European multi-ethnic powers of the same era have also experienced major divisions (British and French colonial empires, Austria-Hungary, Ottoman Turks, Tsarist Russia, British India) or left great potential for division. (Soviet Union).

On the other hand, not appealing to nationalism in modern revolutionary mobilization is folly and grossly self-limiting. Therefore, how to mobilize nationalism and avoid the backlash of nationalism is an important issue for revolutionaries. This is an issue that the elites attached great importance to during the Revolution of 1911. In the context of using strong anti-Manchu sentiment to instigate anti-Qing activities, they proposed a “five ethnic republic” to try to maintain the territory of the Qing Dynasty. However, this is too extravagant for the Republic of China, which cannot even do the Han republic and has created serious ethnic antagonisms in its actual control areas.
In fact, the frontier areas have been in a state that the central government cannot effectively manage for a long time, and the situation is even more severe than in the late Qing Dynasty.

Another consequence of the long-term failure to effectively manage the frontier areas is the accumulation of a large number of complex territorial issues. When the republic was established, from the northeast to Xinjiang, from Tibet to southern Xinjiang, from Taiwan to the South China Sea, the frontiers of land and sea were full of territorial disputes and the division of the sphere of influence of major powers.

The Korean peninsula and the northeast were forced into a chess game between the United States and the Soviet Union. Xinjiang has a strong long-term trend of splitting. Outer Mongolia has already split and the situation in Inner Mongolia is also delicate. Tibet is still deeply dependent on India’s economic logistics, and India is already a new and ambitious country. Great powers, the Southeast Asian direction has not yet resolved the colonial issue, let alone the demarcation issue behind the colonizers. Taiwan is the entrenched land of the former regime. The South China Sea is obviously beyond its reach, but in the long run, it must not be ignored. The East China Sea, the Yellow Sea and the South China Sea Shipping by sea is largely not going well. . . There are many countries and regimes participating in the game, and many of them are simply unable to let go of the fierce game with China, because it involves their basic national security (such as Xinjiang, Mongolia and the Northeast to the Soviet Union, and Tibet to India).

These problems are generally considered to be the problems faced by the Republic, but are largely a consequence of the swift end of the war of liberation. If this civil war is not decided soon, many of these problems will remain, and some of them will be more serious. In the previous course of the Chinese revolution, due to too many more serious problems, many of the above-mentioned problems have not yet become the central concern of the revolutionaries, but once the Chinese revolution has made substantial progress in self-help (such as the effective integration of customs), such problems will become Immediately unavoidable and bound to be coddled with ethnic issues. In other words, even if the Chinese revolution can achieve victory, it will encounter a huge risk of serious external interference at the juncture of victory. This is actually the key to the frustration of many late-developing countries’ self-improvement and self-rescue movements.

In reality, in the late modern period, China was involved in the Korean Peninsula War, which marked the end of the modern revolution and national salvation movement. If we look at the situation in 1945, the Northeast War, the Mongolian War, the Xinjiang War, the Tibet War and the Southern Xinjiang War with foreign intervention were already brewing, and all of them may induce serious ethnic conflicts in the country and cause long-term ethnic hatred. If the Chinese revolution had not won a quick victory, these wars and ethnic trauma would probably have been deeply involved in the Chinese people’s revolutionary movement for national salvation that has been dragging on for far too long.

The Dilemma of the Revolution No. 6 China’s revolutionary self-rescue in modern times has suffered repeated fiasco

The Chinese have tried many ways to save themselves, including the peasant uprising of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom combined with foreign countries, the Westernization Movement, the most fundamentalist Boxer Rebellion, the New Deal at the end of the Qing Dynasty, Yuan Shikai’s restoration of the monarchy (yes, in his opinion, this is also a way of self-salvation), the Western Parliamentary system, civil union-provincial autonomy, the combination of nationalism and Soviet-Russian organization (the late Sun Yat-sen line), the use of warlords to separate the cracks to implement Marxism and the combination of mobilizing peasants to establish local power (Soviet state line), relying on British and American forces to control economically developed areas And gradually use the warlord struggle to expand the basic disk (the line of Chiang Kai-shek). These explorations have suffered heavy failures, or at least heavy setbacks. Especially after the iconic defeats of the last two routes (the end of the Jiangxi Soviet state and only a small percentage of the Red Army surviving the Long March and Chiang Kai-shek’s regime being driven into Sichuan by the Japanese to survive), China seems to have exhausted the imagination of the political route.

We have learned foreign experience, and we have exhausted the traditional Chinese methods. We are willing to dig out the cultural roots of our ancestors, and even combine foreign experience with Chinese practice.
What else can I do? The Japanese could not be beaten on the frontal battlefield, and the battlefield behind the enemy did not know how long it would last.
It seems that the only thing left is to wait for the international situation to change in China’s favor and accept a fate that is not commensurate with the huge population, vast territory, long history and glorious civilization.

Other civilizations have also tried many revolutionary routes in modern times, but China is unique in terms of the richness of trial and error routes and the tragic frequency of failures. Other civilizations, whose repeated failures are far inferior to China’s, have largely exhausted their social self-rescue capabilities and have fallen into a state of no way out for a long time, or have been forced to take the next step and accept half-success and half-failure. ending.

The Dilemma of the Revolution No. 7: Modern China is faced with the difficult choice of whether to resolutely revolutionize to the end

In fact, accepting a half-success and half-failed revolutionary incomplete outcome was a tempting choice for the Chinese people who suffered repeated fiasco in modern times , especially at the time of 1945. In all fairness, the Kuomintang and the Communist Party have been fighting for a generation, and the leaders of both sides are not too young.
China has just recovered from the heavy loss of the Anti-Japanese War, and is waiting to be rebuilt. Peaceful negotiation and peaceful nation-building are politically desirable things.
The Communist Party that later won was supportive of the coalition government, and did not have strong confidence that it could overthrow the Kuomintang’s rule militarily. However, it is not difficult to imagine what a wonderful future China would have lost if there were no series of historic military victories from 1946 to 1953, and if what remained was a peculiar political stitching government. On the other hand, once the coalition government is abandoned but the winner cannot be quickly determined, the prospect of dividing the spheres of influence between the US and the Soviet Union is basically inevitable.

Go back eighteen years, and the National Revolutionary Army, after the great achievements of the Northern Expedition in 1927, faced a major choice . The most prosperous southeast coast has been won, and it is possible to make peace with Britain and the United States. The remaining warlords should not be the opponents of the National Revolutionary Army, although it will take some time. Shall we continue the Great Revolution? If it continues, the mobilized workers and peasants will inevitably demand changes in the distribution system, and how much impact will this have on the military corps? How long will it take for the new distribution system to be established? Can it even be built? Besides the Soviet Union, who else could make the common people rise up and seize power?
Do you want to fight with the United States and Britain? Can you fight? Wouldn’t it benefit Japan, which is even more ill-conceived, by fighting with the United States and Britain? Did the Soviet Union benefit? If you choose to continue the great revolution, the road ahead will inevitably be long and arduous, and it is still entirely possible to fail for other reasons. Chiang Kai-shek in history chose to betray the revolution, but what a disappointment the China under his rule.

Turn the clock back fifteen years, and after the Revolution of 1911, China is also faced with the choice of how far the revolution will go . Since the late Qing Dynasty, it has been more than half a century of poverty and weakness. Now that the decadent Qing Dynasty has been overthrown, should we think that the main task of the revolution has been completed and now we should focus on construction? Even Sun Yat-sen seemed at one point to appear willing to accept the prospect. Of course, we know that it was followed by waves of new revolutions, and China, in the midst of long-term civil wars and social unrest, slipped into a state of inability to “restrain foreigners” and spiraled out of control until most of the mountains and rivers fell. But on the other hand, is it the right way to establish a compromise government after 1911 and not engage in further revolution, let alone a high-intensity revolution? What would China be like without the enlightenment and mobilization of the Great Revolution? In fact, many countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America have provided a large number of templates. I don’t think there is a country with a volume of more than 50 million that everyone is willing to choose.

The clock is turned back again to the time of the Hundred Days Reform in the late Qing Dynasty. The Hundred Days Reform was a failure and greatly exacerbated China’s predicament. But is the reformation a good thing? China has become a late-developing monarchy reforming country that is more than a generation later than Russia and Japan. The majority nation is ruled by a minority royal family. It has bravely entered the world dominated by the West, which has long been divided up and even Germany can’t get on the bus. In the first half of the 20th century, when nationalism and communism were on the rise, how likely is it to succeed in this way of participating in the great game of the industrial countries’ total war against World War I and World War II?

This is the truth that has been repeatedly stated above: if the revolution is carried out to the end, there is a considerable risk of falling into a long-term civil war and further falling behind in the fierce international competition, and it may also collide with powerful imperialism head-on; if the revolution is not carried out to the end, it will be Dragging the body of the rotten mud-footed giant to continue to mix, the future is still dark.

The repeated fiasco stimulation of revolutionary self-help and the repeated choice of whether to revolutionize to the end were an extraordinary long-term test of will for modern Chinese revolutionaries.

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