China, Communism, and the United States

Abstract

S TALIN'S Failure in China deals with the period of CommunistKuomintang relations in the 1920's about which a good deal has already been published. Isaac's The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution appeared over twenty years ago and, though written from a Trotskyist point of view, was well documented. Since 1945 there have been Schwartz's Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao, North's Moscow and the Chinese Communists, and other still more recent works. The new material in Mr. Brandt's book comes mainly from the Trotsky archives at Harvard and from evidence supplied by Chang Kuo-t'ao. It becomes clear that in the matter of China, as on other questions, Trotsky was quite an effective critic of Stalin but had little to offer in the way of a constructive alternative. In this case, the evidence strongly suggests that Trotsky did not start to take any serious interest in China until March I927, by which time it was almost certainly too late for any change in Communist policy to have prevented Chiang Kai-shek's seizure of power. It is possible that the policies advocated by Trotsky might have made the Communist defeat less complete, but it is highly unlikely that they could have prevented it. Ch'en Tu-hsiu is very effectively cleared by Mr. Brandt of the charges made against him in official Communist histories. Far from being an advocate of close association with the Kuomintang, he is shown to have had serious misgivings about this policy from the very beginning but to have again and again allowed his private judgment to be overruled by obedience to Comintern directives. Lominadze, who arrived in China in July I927, was given the mission of making Ch'en Tu-hsiu the scapegoat for Stalin's mistakes and had to use Comintern authority to secure acceptance of his objectives by the Central Committee. There is a point here on which one would like to have further explanation. We are told that at the meeting of the plenum of the Central Committee in August I922 Ch'en Tu-hsiu and four other