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Can the 28 Bolesheviks remain ascendant in Chinese Communism?

neonduke

Kenneth Kaunda drip
I asked this originally in the other place but it got lost in the shuffle and I think it's an interesting period in Chinese Communist history.

I've been reading recently about the beginnings of the Long March, the collapse of the Jiangxsi Soviet and Mao's rise to power after the ousting of Bo Gu amongst others.

Not knowing a great deal about the period but is there a way for the 28 Bolesheviks to keep themselves in a leadership role and avert the rise of Mao. Losing a majority of their soldiers by throwing them at KMT fixed positions seems to be the straw that broke the camels back, would avoiding this help or was it just a matter of time before they were supplanted?

If they do remain the leading force in Chinese communism how much control would Moscow exert on the Chinese Bolesheviks? Would there eventually be tensions and splits, maybe when the purges kick into high gear?

With regards to OTL figures I would think that Zhou Enlai may retain some influence though Mao's eventual fate would be interesting, especially if he tries to politic his way to the top and loses.
 
Moscow would probably have more influence on the CCP. In the long run the fundamental struggle for control in the early CCP was over whether Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy or pragmatism mattered, and to the Twenty-Eight Bolsheviks and their allies in the Comintern, the rural focus that Mao espoused was tantamount to heresy. Mao would probably find himself purged from the party and might then end up leading a peasant-focused agrarian socialist movement against the more urban CCP.

Now for how that might be achieved. The event that probably decided the fate of the CCP from the beginning was Chiang Kai-shek becoming Sun Yat-sen's successor. Chiang was willing to work with the CCP for as long was expedient, but it bears remembering that he had gone to Moscow to learn from the Soviets, and came back deciding that their form of government was wholly unsuited for China. Once he felt secure both with his control over the KMT and his forces' strength over the warlords, he ended the united front, which led to the Shanghai Massacre and the deaths of many of the trade unionists and urban Communists who were the backbone of the CCP. It was at this point that Mao gained his first taste of power by leading the Jiangxi Soviet as a relatively successful rural warlord state, and truly brought him into contestation for the leadership.

So a leader much more amiable to the far left - Wang Jingwei would be the most obvious and also most suitable option - would probably allow the CCP to keep their urban core. Someone like Wang wouldn't want to touch the party and would see them still as a useful ally. However this might mean the KMT would lose subservient warlord allies - Wang believed in no compromise with the warlords, when certain regions, like the northwest under the Ma family, were practically the only authorities that could exert order there - and make the Second Northern Expedition more difficult.

As for the impact in the party itself, I think it could see splits once the Stalin period and the purges get underway, but it might depend still how much the Soviets are still well and truly supporting them. The books that I've read on the subject, including Hsü's The Rise Of Modern China, speak little of the Comintern-aligned Chinese Communists' reaction to the purges, though a number like Zhang Guotao were decidedly less than pleased when Mao launched his Rectification Campaigns, which themselves took on a character similar to the Terror. In any case, I don't see it unfeasible that a Wang-led China would try to seek allies like Germany, Japan, or the United States in addition the Soviet Union, out of some combination of ideology and pragmatism (the Germans and Chinese saw mutually beneficial gains from ties to each other, while Wang was a Pan-Asianist true believer and also admired the ideas of the American republic, and in power could have been a useful ally to a sympathetic United States or a less zealously domineering Imperial Japan, if not to Nazi Germany). That could give the KMT party state some respite if it seeks a break with the Soviets as a result of the purges, while also breaking up the CCP over their directives from the Comintern and how to deal with them, especially if Stalin tries to seek them to fold into the KMT like he did in OTL.

On the other hand, Communism in China was a very much more recent development compared to the European Communist movement, and was more doctrinally united in favour of Marxism-Leninism. Trotsky was no more than a name thrown around as a scapegoat, and there really wasn't a Trotskyist presence in the CCP apart from one of its founders, Chen Duxiu, who I think would himself become seen a Chinese Trotsky and purged by the party. So the CCP will probably still be doctrinally united as a Marxist-Leninist party, and stick more rigidly to Stalin's directives than their counterparts. If splits come about, they probably will emerge as a result of KMT domestic and foreign policies, such as if Wang decided to seek friendship with the Germans or Japanese. Failing that, probably when the full scale of Stalin's purges are revealed to the world.
 
Moscow would probably have more influence on the CCP.

Of course, then you have to remember that the Soviet Union were always very iffy on China going full Communist any time soon. It wasn't even really the whole Marxist material dialectical thing about "first rural feudalism, than urban capitalism, then communism" as much as it was if a country the size of China goes Communist, there's no guarantee at all that they will remain Moscow's loyal vassal for long, and we certainly do not want a rival Communist superpower competing with us. A China crippled by a perpetual power struggle between the Communists and the Nationalists was much more in the national and geopolitical interests of the USSR, and hence why Stalin always remain very cold towards Mao.

Considering Mao's break with Khrushchev, and the eventual Nixon-Mao love affair and all that jazz, one has to say that in this very particular instance, the Stalin's paranoia was actually quite justified.
 
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