(3) Knowledge, real or pretended, of occult sciences, has been so closely related to the struggle for power in China that nearly every rebellion against existing authority or state power, right down to that led by Dr. Sun Yat-sen, sprang from some form of secret society.

(4) Some students of the Chinese language believe the character Tien (Heaven) originally was an ideograph that represented a great man. Later it acquired the meaning of the "place where great men [the ancestors] dwell."

(5) Te character was later given the connotation of virtue by Confucian scholars. Emperors ruled because they possessed Te. They fell when they lost the magic virtue.

(6) The power of the kings was already strong in the Yellow River plain around 1800 B.C. when the Shang dynasty emerged from the era of prehistory. The existence of still earlier dynasties indicates that the kings, though their power was limited, had long before won the battle with the clan chiefs and established a structure and a principle from which China was never able to escape.

(7) Cf. On Power, Bernard De Jouvenel (New York: The Viking Press, 1949), p.90. The victory of the Roman clans led to the creation of the Roman Senate, an institution notably lacking from China, or else so buried in primitive times that it has exercised little influence on the present.

(8) Confucius, much derided by leftist writers, was a "reactionary," in the sense that he wanted to turn back the clock of history. He seems to have been an opponent of both the princely power and the common people who were tending to form an alliance against the aristocracy of his times. In this sense he was both an opponent of democracy, and also of despotism. His doctrines, seven hundred years later, were used by the state as a weapon of thought control but, in a way, they were also checks on the emperor's power.

(9) Chin Shih Huang Ti, the first emperor of China, destroyed the ranks of the old aristocrats by immolating the Confucian scholars, burning the books of the feudal philosophers and creating a centralized bureaucracy. His actions have been execrated by Chinese scholars and the Chinese traditionally have given as much, if not more, admiration to lords who fought unjust kings as they have given to kings who slew nobles.

(10) The continuity of the priest - sage - scholar - bureaucrat tradition in China is amazing and the continuing prestige of the old aristocrats can be seen from the fact that Dr. H. H. Kung, a direct descendant of Confucius, was but recently premier of China.

　　What all these popular uprisings needed in order to convert them into a social revolution were the prophets of a new religion dignifying the worth of man and the industrial democracy furnished by well-developed cities. Even a young country such as America, with no burdensome traditions from the past, could not rid the south of slavery without pressure from the northern cities. How then could a tradition-ridden country like China, with no rising merchant or industrial class, free itself from medieval slavery? The people could change their rulers, but to alter the fundamental condition of their lives remained beyond their powers.

　　The smashing down of China's wall of isolation by the West in the early nineteenth century had a cataclysmic effect and, in the long run, doomed the ancient Chinese society to extinction, because on the one hand it brought Christian ideals and Western concepts of democracy to China while on the other hand it destroyed the self-sufficient feudal economy of the ancient society, broke open the walls of the clans, changed the traditional patterns of "Right conduct," and created classes that had hitherto been absent from Chinese life. In the beginning, however, Western penetration of China produced an exactly opposite effect; it did not weaken, but strengthened the feudal power.

　　In the middle of the nineteenth century, after the Western powers gained a firm foothold in China, there developed in the south a movement of peasants, "long-term" workers and "righteous scholars" known as the Taiping Rebellion. This movement was not unlike the old peasant uprisings against the throne in Peiping, but it had been fertilized by New Testament texts concerning the righteousness of the poor, and it had more of a social basis than the old popular revolts. For this reason it frightened the landed gentry of Central China who had hitherto been in the forefront of the demand for Westernization and who had held aloof from the alien Manchu court. These men soon found it convenient to forget both their modern ideas and their Chinese racial patriotism and to join hands with the foreign dynasty and with the British General Gordon and the American adventurer Ward to put down the rebellion. This triple alliance between Manchu despotism, Chinese feudalism and Western imperialism against the people of China had its counterpart in a triple betrayal. The Manchu court, fearing foreign guns, but fearing more the spread of foreign ideas among their people, betrayed the country to the West. The Chinese landlords, hating the alien dynasty, but fearing the peasants, betrayed their own race. Finally, the foreign powers betrayed their own avowed democratic principles in order to preserve feudalism.

During the next fifty years, the intelligentsia, under the pressure of Western concepts and spurred by the fear of loss of national sovereignty, took up the battle against Manchu despotism. The Westernization of the country became more and more the demand of the scholarly bureaucracy. In 1898, these scholars tried to limit the despotic powers of the Manchus by a series of mild reforms. But these men allied themselves with Confucian ideals and they made no attempts to smash the walls of village clan life and use the released prisoners in the services of a revolutionary power. It is not surprising that the movement remained nothing more than a conspiracy of a few brilliant scholars and collapsed like a house of cards when the Empress Dowager imprisoned the young Emperor Kuang Hsu and seized all the reformists she could and chopped them in half at the waist as traitors. Such was the minor significance of the Reform Movement of Kang Yu-wei.

　　Even when the Manchu dynasty fell in the 1911 Revolution before the attack of foreign ideas, Chinese society remained pretty much what it had been. There might be ferment among the intellectuals at the top, but in the countryside the peasantry greeted the so-called revolution with little more excitement than his ancestors had greeted the change of emperors. The imperial trappings were gone but underneath still lay the rotten body of medieval life.

　　More fundamental than the overthrow of the empire was the economic change that was taking place in the country. The requirements of international trade soon gave to the coastal cities a new importance in Chinese life, as the growth of Shanghai, a mud flat before the advent of foreigners, eloquently testified. To act as brokers between foreign and native capital there came into being a class of entrepreneurs - the Chinese compradors, who were often landlords or bureaucrats or both. Over the course of a century, these men became large merchants, city bankers and factory owners; in short, a budding bourgeoisie. Trailing along behind them came the clerks, the accountants, the new shop owners and the lower-ranking army officers' nascent petty bourgeoisie. And finally, as foreign machine-made goods depressed home handicrafts, a mass of dispossessed peasants flocked into the cities to become factory workers, coolies, thieves and beggars - the proletariat.

　　Born late, these classes - if you can call such paltry groupings classes - could not repeat the history of Western countries. This was particularly true of Chinese businessmen, merchants and factory owners who could not play the progressive role they played in Europe and America because of the peculiar structure of Chinese industry and the conditions under which it originated. To begin with, Chinese industry was extremely weak, with only a minute segment of the population engaged in it. One of the reasons for this weakness was the agrarian structure of the country. Landlords, who received 50 and 6o percent of their tenants' crops found agriculture more profitable than industry and were loath to invest in city enterprises. In the West, the city burgher would have led the peasants against the landlords, but in China the compradores were so involved with the big landowners that they dreaded a change of property relations in any form. In addition to its weakness, Chinese industry was concentrated in a narrow strip along the seacoast so that the capitalist was separated from the great mass of the people in the interior. Finally, it must be remembered that modem Chinese business enterprises and industry were all an outgrowth of trade with the West. The proprietors of the principal industrial, banking and shipping companies were foreigners who derived not only profits from China, but also played a political role in Chinese affairs, often opposing the popular wishes of the people, of which the interference in the Taiping Rebellion was but one of many instances.

　　Thus, the Chinese merchant-industrial class, because of the conditions of its birth, was involved in a double contradiction. For the city bankers and the factory owners had not only failed to cut the cords which bound them to the landlords, but they had also fashioned new chains which bound them to foreign capital. This forced them, even against their will, to put further brakes on the development of Chinese society.

　　Having divorced itself from the workers in the cities and particularly from the peasant masses in the countryside, the Chinese bourgeoisie lost the capacity for political action. Unable to fight the landlords, as European city merchants once fought manorial barons, the nascent capitalists had no other course but to permit themselves to be dragged like captives behind Chiang Kai-shek's military chariot.

　　Chiang Kai-shek, himself, having crushed the workers and the farmersand enslaved a weak capitalist class, had to turn for support to the landlords and the gentry. Because he allied himself with medieval elements of Chinese society, he could not solve the basic problem of China's agrarian revolution. It is not surprising that he, therefore, became one of the most contradictory despots in the four thousand years of Chinese history.

　　But if the Chinese bourgeoisie, captive to both landlords and foreign capital, was too weak to play the role the French bourgeoisie played in the French Revolution, then the Chinese working class was also too weak to play the role the Russian proletariat did in the Russian Revolution. On this hard rock the Chinese Communist party, in fact, the whole Marxist world, cracked its head more than once before it learned any wisdom.

　　What originally gave the Chinese Communists the idea that they could conquer power through the proletariat was undoubtedly the success of the Russian Revolution itself.

　　There were, however, important differences between the character and the life conditions of the Russian and the Chinese proletariat. Chinese workers were perhaps more revolutionary than their brothers in the West for the simple reason that they were ferociously oppressed, not only by their native capitalists but by the forces of foreign imperialism and feudal gangsterism. In the semicolonial state of China, there was no economic foundation for social reform such as that existing in western Europe so that the whole working class was predisposed to seek a solution of their dilemma by violent revolutionary methods. They simply had no other way out. But the revolutionary spirit of the Chinese working class could not make up for some of its gravest weaknesses. In the first place, there were only two and a half to three million modern industrial workers in a total population of 450 million. There were perhaps ten to twelve million town handicraftsmen and hired laborers and a large number of rural workers who might be classed among the proletariat but they were entirely too scattered to play the same role they did in the Russian Revolution. Secondly, the Chinese proletariat was very young and inexperienced when compared to the proletariat in Western countries, while its cultural standard was far below that of its enemies in the bourgeoisie. (12) Finally, and very important, three-quarters of all the modern industrial workers in China were concentrated in zones of foreign control and under the menacing guns of foreign warships.

　　Shanghai provided the classic prototype of this dual control. "Here," in the words of Edgar Snow, "you could see British, American, French, Japanese, Italian and Chinese soldiers, sailors, and police, all the forces of world imperialism combined with native gangsterism and the comprador bourgeoisie, the most degenerate elements in Chinese society "co-operating" in wielding the truncheon over the heads of the hundreds of thousands of unarmed workers." (13)

　　The Chinese proletariat therefore had to contend not only with one enemy, as did the Russian worker of 1917, but with two: his own nascent bourgeoisie and the entrenched interests of the Western powers. All insurrections in the cities were therefore doomed to failure almost from the start. After the failure of the 1927 Revolution, the Communist party had to fall back on the rural areas and, while retaining the aims of Socialism and the ideology of Communism, assumed in practice the role of agrarian democrats. In the meantime, Chiang Kai-shek held the cities and his power remained relatively secure.

(12) We have been speaking here mainly about the upper or comprador bourgeoisie. The Chinese merchant-industrial class, however, also included elements which were not tied to foreign capital and which various observers have called the "national" or "middle" bourgeoisie. This class controlled by the big landowners and the compradors never held any real political power and therefore under certain circumstances it tended to ally itself with the Communists against Chiang Kai-shek.

(13) Edgar Snow, Red Star Over China, Random House.

　　The Japanese invasion of China, plus World War II, however, produced a striking change in the correlation of forces, not only in China, but all over the world and gave a mighty impetus to the Chinese Revolution.

　　In the first place, the defeat of Japan, the disarming of Italy, the almost total collapse of French power and the exhaustion of England meant that these powers could not assay any serious adventures in the Pacific even to save the regime of Chiang Kai-shek. Furthermore, the Western powers, as a means of keeping Chiang in the war against Japan, had abrogated all the unequal treaties, agreed to return the foreign concessions and relinquish all military bases; in short, to recognize China s a sovereign nation. This is just what the Kuomintang government had been demanding for twenty years, but in finally putting his stamp of approval on this agreement, Chiang practically signed his own death warrant. For, in effect, this meant that if the Communists ever gained enough power in the countryside so that they could move on the cities, would be totally without that Western support which had heretofore been an aid in keeping down the workers.

　　That, of course, could only be the final act of a war between the Communists and Chiang because the Red's 8th Route Army was still very much confined to rural China. But in this countryside itself, great changes had been brought about by the Japanese invasion. Driven into the interior, deprived of its coastal industry and foreign trade, the Chiang Kai-shek despotism during the eight years of the Japanese war came into still sharper conflict with the Chinese people. The comprador bourgeoisie grew more powerful, but its power rested on the ability of the upper bureaucracy to wrest control of important commercial, industrial and banking ventures from native groups in the interior. Also, at the end of the war, the Kuomintang bureaucrats gobbled up many enterprises the Japanese had looted from the Chinese people in Shanghai and Hankow, besides thrusting their way into newspapers, agricultural corporations, shipping companies, banks and many ventures large and small that had hitherto belonged to private interests. Such actions, which alienated native industrialists, merchants and others, tended to isolate the ruling group from quarters that had hitherto supported them. The weight of the petty bourgeoisie, though relatively insignificant, was now also ready to be thrown against the despotism, because government clerks, teachers and army officers, paid in printing press money, felt that their rulers could no longer guarantee their economic livelihood. Finally, the war had brought significant changes in the attitude of the democratic intelligentsia who had become disgusted with the passive attitude Chiang adopted toward the Japanese while suppressing every kind of democratic freedom among his own people. These men, though they had no firm social support, had a great following among the students and they were the most outspoken of all Chiang's critics, some of them even being killed for their views.

　　In these circumstances, for the Communists to adapt Lenin's program of an immediate proletarian dictatorship to China would have been chimerical. The correlation of forces practically compelled Mao Tze-tung, leader of the Communist party, to advocate a democratic revolution on the broadest possible lines. In switching tactics from proletarian dictatorship to a union of all groups, Mao was certainly closer to the February Revolution in Russia or even in some respects to the French Revolution or a Cromwellian peasant war than to the October Revolution. If that horrified orthodox Marxists, Mao could point out that it was not until the Chinese Communists adopted this program that they began to make any headway. In calling forth a democratic revolution, the Communists hoped to gain the eventual support of nearly the whole mass of the people, except the landlords, the higher army officers, the upper-crust bureaucrats and the very few favored industrialists and compradors tied to Chiang Kai-shek's machine and to foreign capital.