"The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution by Harold Isaacs"

(Read here )

   (Introduction of Trotsky: we cannot talk today of “the working class” in general, but only of certain portions of it, as being revolutionary, at least potentially. These are IT specialists, first of all. But still the question of “revolutionary class” for modernity is not clear. “Knowledge” in the widest sense of the word becomes the prime moving material productive force.)

Ch.I

the class of compradores, brokers for foreign capital on the Chinese market

Taiping rebellion – 1850’s – a peasant rebellion developing towards a “normal” bourgeois society

Taipings were defeated because of imperialist power intervention, around 1865

Industrialization of China begins in late 19th century, Shanghai is the epicenter

“Boxers.”- The rebels changed their slogan from “Down with the Manchus! Protect the Chinese!” to “Down with the Foreigners! Long Live the Imperial Dynasty!” [24]

With the disappearance of nominal central authority, power passed into the hands of provincial or regional satraps committed to the preservation of the whole existing exploitative system.

Ch.II

(The main problem appears to be land for the landless peasants)

No radical revision in Chinese economic life could even be contemplated if in the first instance the revolution did not restore to the peasant the land and the product of his toil.

Ch.III

A new awakening –a Chinese version of Enlightenment – starts in the beginning of XX century

May 4th - an anti-imperialist, cultural, and political movement growing out of student demonstrations in Beijing on May 4, 1919, protesting the Chinese government's weak response to the Treaty of Versailles, especially the Shandong Problem. These demonstrations sparked national protests and marked the upsurge of Chinese nationalism, a shift towards political mobilization and away from cultural activities, and a move towards populist base rather than intellectual elites

Sun Yat-sen’s 3 principles: 1) nationalism, 2) democracy 3) people’s livelihood

CP is born in 1921

A project for a two-party alliance between the Chinese Communists and the Kuomintang was put forward at the second national conference of the Communist Party in 1922. When this plan was laid before Sun Yat-sen by Dalin, a Russian delegate of the Young Communist International, Sun rejected it. He told Dalin he might permit Communists to join the Kuomintang, but would countenance no two-party alliance. Shortly afterward, Maring, the first delegate of the Comintern in China who had already been in contact with Sun in the south, met with the Communist Central Committee at West Lake, Hangchow, and proposed that the Communists join the Kuomintang and utilize its broad loose organizational structure as a means for developing their propaganda and contacts among the masses.

Bolsheviks gave money and organizational help in founding the W. Military Academy

a foreign imperialist and a local warlord torturing a Chinese patriot in the aftermath of the May 30th Movement in China.

Shanghai Municipal Police officers opened fire on Chinese protesters in Shanghai's International Settlement

Continue: http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/isaacs/1938/tcr/ch04.htm

Ch.IV

(Boring because dwells on details of the past, while the big picture has already happened before us)