A Desolate Path Taken by the Chinese Trotskyists:heir Interpretations and Practices of the “Permanent Revolution”
Date Issued
2008
Date
2008
Author(s)
Cheng, Kun-Teng
Abstract
By analyzing the various interpretations of the Permanent Revolution by the Chinese Trotskyists, the thesis aims to study the causes and legacies of their emergence and use them as a prism to explore certain distinctive qualities of the Chinese Communist movement. The thesis first introduces the Trotsky’s conception of the Permanent Revolution. He argues that the proletariat in underdeveloped capitalist countries can seize political power and build up proletarian dictatorship easier than their counterparts in other countries. Afterwards, they can launch World Revolution to compensate for the deficiency of their productive forces. Then, the thesis argues that Chinese Trotskyism and the Chinese Trotskyists came into existence as a result of the failure of the Chinese Revolution from 1925 to 1927. The Russian Communist Party, the first launcher of the proletarian revolution in history, held China as disqualified to copy their experience, since the contemporary circumstances of China was more in favor of a bourgeois revolution. And yet the Chinese Trotskyists held a different opinion. They believed that for a successful revolution to ever take place, it had to be started by the working class, just like the case in Russia. An important debate thus ensued as to the theories and practices of revolution among the Trotskyists, the Comintern, and the Chinese Communist Party. Through the complicated debates surrounding Chinese Social History, Claiming China was a capitalist country in nature, the Trotskyists argued China should apply and practice the theory of proletarian revolution, an argument that dovetailed with Li Dazhao’s idea before the Chinese Communist Party was founded. And yet such an idea was condemned as heretical and evil by the Comintern and the Chinese Communist Party, who began to suppress the Trotskyist group ruthlessly both in ideology and in politics. Lastly the thesis outlines the endless disputes among important Chinese Trotskyists, especially those between Chen Duxiu and his comrades. Their debates concerning the Permanent Revolution and the Second Sino-Japanese War were conducive to a fuller understanding of Modern Chinese History. Based on the above study, the thesis would like to argue that the emergence of the Chinese Trotskyism and Trotskyists represented “a reversion to origins” (Arif Dirlik). The ideas they had followed so closely—the Proletarian Revolution, internationalism, and democracy—were the ideas initially embraced as the highest criteria in the Chinese Communist movement. Their failure was not because of their radical application of the Permanent Revolution, but because they had transplanted to China the model of Russian urban revolution without necessary modification. Also, their fate was determined by the failure of World Revolution as well, which in turn led to the dictatorship of the bureaucracy the Trotskyists strongly detested in the first place. After a succession of failures, the Chinese Trotskyists began to rethink and revisit a series of important theoretical problems—such as the regime of Chinese Communist Party, the Maoism, the Permanent Revolution, and so on so forth—in the hope that one day, they might be able to realize the Communist Revolution .
Subjects
Chinsese Trotskyists
Permanent Revolution
proletarian dictatorship
Trotsky
the controversy on Chinese social history
Chen Duxiu
Democracy
SDGs
Type
thesis
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