Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow and the Chinese Revolution - KU ...

asked, that a "partial and temporary defeat" was not a decline?
Eventually, our cell director replied with Stalin's argument that the
Chinese revolution had entered a higher stage of development with
the April 12 coup, the phase of agrarian revolution. Yet Stalin had
also said that "in a number of areas, such as Hunan, Hupeh, etc., the
peasants are already seizing the land from below, and are setting up
their own courts, their own penal organs and their own self-defence
bodies." 11 If this agrarian movement had already gotten under way
by the time of the April 12 coup, I wanted to know, why had Comrade
Stalin linked this new, agrarian phase of the Chinese revolution to the
April 12 coup ? Again our cell director lapsed into embarrassed silence.
So I poured oil on the flames. Could it be, I demanded, that the
agrarian revolution had been overdone and that its excesses had caused
the April 12 coup? I was, of course, not alone in pressing such questions.
Nor was I the only one to question Stalin's statement that
"Chiang Kai-shek's coup is one of those zigzags in the course of the
Chinese revolution, one that was needed in order to cleanse the revolution
of dross and to impel it forward towards a powerful agrarian
movement." 12 Did Comrade Stalin contend, a number of us wanted
to know, that the April 12 coup was a necessary prerequisite to the
agrarian revolution and that Chiang Kai-shek was a contributor to
this revolution ? And so we wrangled in our cell meetings. In the end
our cell director announced that the issues that Comrade Stalin had
touched upon were so complicated that we would have to explore them
in greater detail at a later time. With that he adjourned our meeting.
Perhaps I should note here that, speaking strictly for myself, my doubts
about some of the things Stalin said did not lessen my support for
Comintern leadership of the Chinese revolution as a whole.
Five days after Stalin's address at Sun Yat-sen University, on May
18, 1927, the Eighth Plenum of the ECCI was held. Trotsky's address
to the plenum, which included his theses on China, was not made
available to the public. The Trotskyite opposition, nevertheless, again
stepped up its bitter attacks on the Comintern's China policy. And the
students and faculty members at Sun Yat-sen University who sympathized
with the opposition, after a brief period of restraint which
followed Stalin's May 13 address at the university, also increased the
tenor of their opposition to Comintern policy in China. Indeed, so
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