Their Lenin, Our Lenin: Proper Names and the Politics of Revolutionary Mourning in Early Chinese Marxism

On 18 September 1991, the representative assembly of the Berlin district of Friedrichshain voted to request from the Berlin Senate the removal of the statue of Lenin from Leninplatz (Lenin Square). The demolition started later the same year (Gamboni, 1997, p. 83). In January 1992, protesters participating in the annual commemoration march for two German communists, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, carried some stones of the now demolished Lenin monument to the Gedenkstätte der Sozialisten (Memorial of Socialists) in Berlin Friedrichsfelde and buried them next to the gravestones of Luxemburg and Liebknecht. Ironically, even if most certainly not intended by the demonstrators, this act very much symbolizes the fate of the memorialization of these communist icons in unified Germany. Lenin monuments were demolished all over East Germany in the early 1990s and public commemoration ceremonies were no longer held in his honour. Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, however, faced quite a different fate. Even today, more than 10,000 people visit the Gedenkstätte der Sozialisten each year to commemorate the two communists (E. Schmid, 2010). And while the Lenin monument in Berlin was demolished in the early 1990s, the coalition of Social Democrats (SPD) and the post-communist Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) in the Berlin Senate agreed in 2002 to erect a monument for Rosa Luxemburg.KeywordsParty LeaderDemocratic SocialismHistoric MissionRepresentative AssemblyEast German StateThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Although the united front effort had limitations, the Chinese Communists were successful in soliciting the support of big business in the years preceding 1997 in preparation for the handover. Beijing did not hesitate to announce those who were its staunch supporters and those whom it considered troublemakers. The ultimate objective was to ensure the smooth transfer of the administration of Hong Kong in 1997. In forming the Preliminary Work Committee (PWC) and appointing the Hong Kong Affairs Advisers and District Affairs Advisers, the Chinese Communists created a three-tier united front to consolidate their position regarding the future leadership of the Hong Kong SAR. Thus, the united front work of this period was more restricted than the effort made in the 1980s, as Beijing did not select members of the United Democrats of Hong Kong, who had opposing opinions and were critical of the Communist strategy. In contrast to earlier times, the Chinese Communists openly declared the enemy of the united front—the last governor of Hong Kong, Christopher (Chris) Patten.KeywordsPolitical ReformDirect ElectionBusiness EliteUnite FrontIndependent Commission Against CorruptionThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Was Maoist China a Clone of the Soviet Union? Felix Wemheuer Lucien Bianco, Stalin and Mao: A Comparison of the Russian and Chinese Revolutions, translated by Krystyna Horko. 448 pp. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2018. ISBN 978-9882370654. $65.00. Elizabeth McGuire, Red at Heart: How Chinese Communists Fell in Love with the Russian Revolution. 462 pp. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. ISBN 978-0190640552. $34.95. It has become fashionable in Western China studies to write about transnational entanglements between the People's Republic (PRC) and the Soviet Union or to compare the development of both countries. The similarities of Stalin's Soviet Union and Mao's China are obviously many, making it impossible to cover them all in a single text. Two new books approach this comparison from different angles. Lucian Bianco looks at the great leaders and macropolitics in Stalin and Mao: A Comparison of the Russian and Chinese Revolutions, while Elizabeth McGuire uses a focus on personal relations and microhistory in Red at Heart: How Chinese Communists Fell in Love with the Russian Revolution. This review discusses the two monographs within the larger context of Western China studies and with attention to paradigm shifts in Sino-Soviet relations. Paradigm Shifts in Western China Studies Since the mid-1930s, Western scholarship regarding the impact of the Soviet Union on the Chinese Revolution and later the PRC underwent several paradigm shifts. During World War II and under the alliance of the United States and China against the Japanese Empire, Chinese Communists were often considered anti-imperialists and nationalists. The bestseller Red Star over China, written by the American journalist Edgar Snow, contributed to [End Page 442] the view of Mao Zedong as a grassroots revolutionary. The lives of communist leaders in the revolutionary base area in Yan'an were presented by Snow as simple and egalitarian. Therefore, Snow saw Chinese communism as an alternative to bureaucratic state socialism in the Soviet Union.1 When the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) took power in 1949, the Cold War had already started. Anticommunist hardliners in the McCarthy era blamed "liberals" of the former Roosevelt administration and scholars in China studies for underestimating the communist threat and causing the "loss of China." In the 1950s, the newly founded PRC was often seen in the West as a "Soviet satellite state" and "totalitarian dictatorship." Western perception started to change significantly due to the rise of the Anti–Vietnam War movement and the New Left around 1968. Activists and many scholars then saw Maoist China through the lenses of anti-imperialism and Third World liberation movements.2 The New Left considered the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) an experiment in mass participation and rural based-development strategies. Western media reports about the horrors of the Cultural Revolution were often ignored as "anticommunist propaganda"; violence was rationalized, because "revolution is not a dinner party," as Chairman Mao had said. The guerilla fighter and the "barefoot doctor" became poster children for an alternative development model to Western and Soviet modernity. CCP criticism of "Soviet revisionism," and in part Western scholarship, emphasized the "Chinese way" of building socialism.3 From the 1930s until the early 1990s, the history of the CCP was often written as step-by-step emancipation from domination by the Comintern and the Soviet Union. The departure from revolutionary Maoism in China after "Reform and Opening" in 1978 destroyed many dreams and illusions. However, it was only after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening of the archives of the Comintern and CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union), that the history of the Chinese Revolution was rewritten again. The new findings from archives deconstructed the myths that the CCP had taken an independent path from the Soviet Union. Stalin's guidance and Soviet support had played [End Page 443] a crucial role in creating the second United Front with the Nationalists (GMD) against Japan in 1937 and in bringing the CCP into power in 1949.4 Archival documents show that Soviet advisers influenced the development of the political and economic system in China in the early 1950s based on the Stalinist model. In the fields of culture, education, agriculture, and policies...

The Ultimate Social Network: China's Expansionary, Internationally Oriented United Front Strategies 1923-2020

This book begins in August 1914. These were leaden times in which the mole of history had buried itself deep in the ground. No date revealed the powerlessness of the Left in Europe like 4 August 1914, when the SPD group in the Reichstag voted unanimously to approve war credits. Rosa Luxemburg spoke of a ‘world tragedy’ (Luxemburg 2004, 313). The outbreak of World War I marginalised the radical Left in Europe entirely. Only a few immediately and definitively branded the war an inter-imperialist conflict and declared war on it in turn. They formed a small, upright grouping: the German Gruppe Internationale, the Russian Bolsheviks and the grouping of internationalist Mensheviks, the Dutch Tribunists, the French syndicalists, the small Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania, as well as minorities in other political groups. Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, Vladimir Lenin, and Anton Pannekoek all belonged to this group. The state of war marked a deep caesura. Class struggle was removed from the political agenda in favour of the war of nations. Censorship and political repression made work among the proletarian masses and the army nearly impossible.

On 15 January 1919, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were brutally murdered in Berlin. This article examines the significance of their murders a century ago, and the continuing relevance of their lives and writings today. It begins by providing a brief summary of the history of Germany, from its establishment in 1871 through to the Weimar Republic after the First World War. This sets the context for the discussion of the Social Democratic Party and the establishment of the Communist Party and Spartacus League, and an examination of the roles played by Luxemburg and Liebknecht and the events that led to their murders. The final sections reflect on the legacy of their lives and contributions. The article argues their example and writings are great assets for all who participate in the struggle today for a better system — for socialism.

A "Second International Workingmen's Association" was established in 1889, six years after the death of Marx in 1883. The Second International became a powerful worldwide organization that included some of the largest political parties in western European countries. The Second International was distinguished from the First International in that its member parties were required to accept the orthodox principles of "scientific socialism" of Marxist revolutionary theory, as opposed to a heterogeneous mix of other socialist theories. Germany was seen as the leading country of the Second International in terms of both its political strength and its leading theoreticians of Marxist orthodoxy. Following the death of Frederick Engels in 1895, three of the leading German theoreticians were Karl Liebknecht, Karl Kautsky, and Rosa Luxemburg.

A different fate from their fellow insurgents befell Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. They could not resolve to flee, yet in light of the arrest orders that had been issued against them they likewise also avoided their homes. But when the rumour emerged in the press that they had fled to the Dutch border, on 15 January 1919, Karl Liebknecht wrote in an article in the Rote Fahne, which presents the Spartacist movement as not to be defeated:

For social groups, as for individuals, memory is an important part of their identity. Therefore political parties usually have an instrumental relation to their own party's history whose function is to enhance party identity. The ‘official’ party history normally is inclusive, designed as a composition of party heroes and villains as well as of party achievements which all members and ideological wings can agree upon or, at least, where they can find themselves represented. But sometimes it is hard to agree on history. All wings and currents of Die Linke can agree on Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht as symbols; their assassination in January 1919 is commemorated by a demonstration every year. Unexpected intra-party conflicts arose when in December 2006 a stone was placed at the cemetery Friedrichsfelde in Berlin near the graves of Luxemburg and Liebknecht commemorating the ‘victims of Stalinism’.

On 9 November 1918, Reich Chancellor Prinz Max von Baden decided toforce events and, without consulting Wilhelm II, announced that the Kaiser had abdicated. Fifteen minutes later, newsboys of the Ullstein publishing house roamed the streets of Berlin, selling copies of BZ am Mittag announ-cing the sensational news. It was a scoop in which the publishers were to take pride for decades to come.1 The end of the Wilhelmine era, however, also saw the end of the near-monopoly which Ullstein had held on the Berlin tabloid market. In January 1919 a competitor was launched, Neue Berliner Zeitung/Das 12-Uhr-Blatt. On the very first day of its appearance, 12-Uhr-Blatt managed to beat the Ullstein tabloid to the latest sensation, being the first to report on the murder of the Communist leaders, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.2 The following month, in early February 1919, BZ am Mittag re-established its claim on being ‘the fastest newspaper in the world’.3 Friedrich Ebert was making his way up the stairs of the Weimar National Theatre to give the opening speech to the first session of the newly elected National Assembly when newsboys offered him the latest edition of BZ am Mittag. As for Ebert’s speech, including his appeal for national unity and the slogan of transition ‘from imperialism to idealism’ — Germany’s first tabloid had covered it all, even prior to the actual event.4 Fourteen years later, it was another Ullstein tabloid, Tempo, which managed to beat a now much fiercer competition to the news that Hitler had just been appointed Reich Chancellor.5

Rosa Luxemburg (Rozalia Luxemburg, 1870–1919), born in Zamość (Poland) in a wealthy Jewish family highly committed to children education, was a distinguished figure of the German social democracy, the co-founder of the Spartacus League together with Karl Liebknecht, and eventually killed in Berlin as a result of the repression under the social democratic government following the January Communist Revolt in 1919.

The present research paper is an attempt to shed some light on the causes of Germany’s ratification of the Armistice of Rethondes on November 11th, 1918 that ended fighting in World War I. The armistice was signed by the German civilian politician Matthias Erzberger and the Allied Supreme Commander, Marshall Ferdinand Foch in a railroad carriage at Compiègne forest. The paper will clarify the political and military developments during the last two years of the war between Germany and the Allies, mainly with the withdrawal of Bolshevik Russiaafter the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk on Marsh 3rd, 1918. The United States of America took part in the war by the side of the Allies in April 1917 after the American President Wilson’s fourteen principles had been outlined on January 14th, 1918 among which the right of people to self-determination. The upheaval of socialism as a new political and economic system brought many conceptual changes mainly in Germany and the end of the German Reich (1871-1918) due to a socialist revolution prior to the war supported by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. Henceforth, came a republican government and signed f the armistice with the Allies first and then the Treaty of Versailles on June 28th, 1919. Indeed, the signature of the Armistice of Rethondes and the Treaty of Versailles nurtured the German nationalism between 1919 and 1939 paving the way to World War II and the ramification of a second Armistice of Rethondes by France, this time, on June 22nd, 1940 at Compiègne forest in the same railroad carriage where Germany, in 1918) signed the first armistice.

It is a wonder that the Weimar Republic, besieged from the outset by hostile forces, should have lasted for as long as it did: fourteen years. The early years were turbulent: revolution threatened from the left; attempted coups d’état were staged from the right; political assassination claimed the lives of many democrats, notably ministers Matthias Erzberger and Walther Rathenau, and the leaders of the left-wing Spartacists, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg; monetary instability ruined the lives of millions; in the later years of the republic, from 1930, economic depression tore deep into the social and political fabric and propelled the republic towards its end.

In late 1922, following the assassination of German Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau by members of the ultra-nationalist terror organization Consul, the communist Reichstag delegate Paul Fröhlich published his book Wider den weißen Mord (Against the White Terror), with which he wished to contribute to the ongoing debate about the nature of counter-revolutionary violence in post-war Central Europe.1 Three years after the bloody suppression of the so-called Spartacist Uprising in Berlin, the crushing of the Munich Soviet republic by German and Austrian Freikorps, and the fall of the communist Béla Kun regime in Hungary, Fröhlich's book aimed to explain the endurance of paramilitary violence and nationalist terror in the defeated states of Central Europe. Following the failure of communist uprisings in Central Europe, this wave of ultra-nationalist violence claimed tens of thousands of lives, including those of prominent politicians and public intellectuals such as Walther Rathenau, Matthias Erzberger, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, the Austrian novelist Hugo Bettauer, the Hungarian journalist Béla Bacsó, and the editor of the Hungarian Social Democratic daily Népszava, Béla Somogyi.2

A Major obstacle to analysis of Communist movements is the, absence of firsthand evidence on attitudes and motivations affecting tension and cohesion. The refusal of four thousand members of the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese Communist Youth Corps to return to the mainland after the Korean War offered an unusually large and representative cross-section of these two organizations for systematic interrogation. The results of such an interrogation conducted by the author in April 1954, while in no way conclusive, provide suggestive statistical and analytical information concerning the composition and motivations of the post-Yenan Chinese Communist.According to official Communist figures, the Chinese Communist Party numbered approximately three million in December 1948 and more than five million in June 1950. This increase of two million members in eighteen months represents the most rapid expansion of Party rolls in the history of the Chinese Communist movement. It occurred after victory was in sight, but before rigorous measures to consolidate control erupted in the “Three Anti” and “Five Anti” movements of 1951. Those who joined the Party during this period form a group strikingly different from the elite of the Chinese Communist movement, which is composed of devoted revolutionaries trained in the rigorous experiences of the Long March and the wartime days of Yenan.