In the following article, Robert Griffiths, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Britain (CPB), surveys the proud history of solidarity between the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB, founded in 1920) and the Communist Party of China (CPC, founded in 1921), up to the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949 and the outbreak of war in Korea the following year.
Noting the British colonial presence in China since the seizure of Hong Kong in 1841, he writes that the CPGB was well aware of its responsibility in the “belly of the beast” to oppose British imperialism’s machinations.
After British colonial police shot down striking workers in Shanghai in May 1923, the CPGB launched a militant ‘Hands off China’ campaign. In 1927, Tom Mann, a leading CPGB trade unionist, embarked on a five-month mission to China on behalf of the Red International of Labour Unions. Speaking on arrival, he accused the “British imperialist pirates” of filling history with numerous bloody pages.
In his maiden speech to parliament, having been elected as the Communist MP for West Fife in 1935, Willie Gallacher spoke out against the British government’s acquiescence in Japan’s aggression against China.
The Labour government of Clement Attlee announced its recognition of the newly founded People’s Republic on January 6, 1950, but less than a year later Chinese and British troops were confronting each other as the cold war turned hot on the Korean peninsula. The CPGB responded with a courageous ‘Hands off Korea’ campaign.
This article was originally carried in the special supplement marking the 75th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, which was compiled and edited by Friends of Socialist China and published together with the Morning Star on Saturday, September 28, to coincide with our conference the same day.
The PDF of the full Morning Star supplement may be downloaded here.
Inspired by Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution, the Communist Party of China (CPC) held its founding congress in July 1921.
With the inability of the nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) to consolidate its authority and therefore its failure to lift the country out of its semi-colonial and semi-feudal state, intellectuals and workers had begun studying the ideas of Marxism.
Since Britain’s seizure of Hong Kong in 1841, other imperialist powers had carved up Chinese territory from Manchuria in the north to the island of Taiwan in the southeast, also taking control of bustling port cities from Shanghai down to Canton (now Guangzhou).
The British, Japanese and French ruling classes had waged wars, imposed treaties and suppressed popular rebellions in order to enforce their commercial interests, often in collaboration with the Qing dynasty or local warlords.
In 1919, student protests erupted in Beijing against the decision of the Great War allies to maintain their “international settlements” in China and specifically to transfer control of Shandong province from Germany to Japan. The May 4th Movement raised the banner of national sovereignty and democracy against this fresh humiliation.
Britain’s communist party, the CPGB, formed the following year, was well aware of its responsibility in the “belly of the beast” to oppose British imperialism’s machinations. The party’s press supported and reported on the struggles of Chinese workers, students and peasants.
The CPGB also endorsed the line of the Communist International (Comintern) that the CPC work with the Kuomintang in the fight for a ‘new democracy’. From 1923, Soviet aid helped the movement to reorganise and re-arm.
Rail and dock workers, coal miners and seafarers took industrial action as feudal warlords deposed one another and the Kuomintang prepared for a major military push northwards to overthrow the warlords and unite the country. However, the death of its leader Dr. Sun Yat-sen enabled divisions to deepen within the movement and for right-wing forces to gain ascendancy.
In May 1923, after a Japanese employer shot dead a CPC trade unionist, protestors filled the streets of Shanghai, only to be gunned down by British colonial police. Millions of people then struck and marched across China, some clashing fatally with British and Japanese security forces.
The CPC rapidly grew and built trade union and local strike committees, culminating in the formation of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions. Peasant associations were set up in the countryside.
In Britain, the CPGB launched a militant ‘Hands Off China’ propaganda campaign of leaflets, meetings and marches. Labour Monthly editor Rajani Palme Dutt declared China’s example as one which “lit up the world”. The ebb of European capitalist-imperialist expansion had begun; the subject nations were finding their way to freedom.
Britain’s workers had a duty to demand the complete withdrawal of all British forces and garrisons from China – something the TUC and Labour Party had failed to do.
As the KMT’s National Revolutionary Army (at that time in a united front with the Communist Party of China) advanced northwards in 1926, organisations of workers and peasants grew rapidly – to the alarm of warlords, landlords and capitalists within China and beyond.
The CPGB press publicised these gains, and miners’ leader Arthur Horner moved an emergency resolution at the TUC conference, warning that any British military intervention in China would be aimed at the Soviet Union as well.
The party newspaper Workers’ Weekly exposed Foreign Office plans to split the Kuomintang by sending diplomat Miles Lampson, 1st Baron Killearn, to China. His previous intrigues in Japan and Siberia had failed to overthrow the revolutionary regime in Russia.
His new job was to promise recognition of a future Kuomintang regime, provided the Nationalists turn on their Communist allies. This duly happened in April 1927, after British and US warships on the Yangtze River bombarded newly liberated Nanjing.
In league with imperial police and local criminal gangs, the Kuomintang, now under the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek, swooped into Shanghai and other cities to disarm the workers and kill or imprison many thousands of actual or suspected communists.
Chiang’s regime received almost instant recognition in London, Paris, Rome and Washington DC.
Two months before the massacres, Tom Mann had travelled to Canton (Guangzhou) on a mission for the Red International of Labour Unions. Speaking on arrival, he accused the “British imperialist pirates” of filling history with many bloody pages, oppressing hundreds of millions of colonial peoples. Over the next five months, Mann addressed dozens of meetings in China, joined workers on picket lines and led a mass march against the arrival of thousands more imperialist troops.
He remained a tireless champion of Chinese workers and the CPC until his death in 1941.
As Communist MP for West Fife from 1935, Willie Gallacher took up the cudgels for China in his maiden speech. Why, he wanted to know, had the National Government refused to back the League of Nations against Japan’s invasion and occupation of China’s Manchuria since 1931, yet now sided with the League against Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia (Ethiopia)? In both cases, the British government was doing whatever served the interests of British railway shareholders.
Throughout that decade, Gallacher and the CPGB opposed any diplomatic recognition of Japan’s puppet state in northern China, challenged police actions against demonstrators in Shanghai, condemned plans to build British military barracks on the Chinese mainland and, in 1937, called for more medical aid to Chinese cities under military attack from Japan.
The CPGB and its Daily Worker newspaper supported a new CPC-Kuomintang united front in the fight against Japan’s “military-fascist clique”. By the time of Japan’s surrender in August 1945, the war had cost China between 20 and 35 million civilian and military lives.
After Chiang Kai-shek, aligned with the United States, refused to establish a democratic coalition government that would include the CPC and other parties, a second civil war broke out in 1946. The defeated Nationalists took refuge in Taiwan three years later.
As ever, the CPGB defended the actions of the CPC, including in the “Yangtse Incident” (1949) when British military vessels were hit in the crossfire between Nationalist and Communist forces. HMS Amethyst ran aground and 49 British service personnel perished.
Naval personnel and bereaved relatives besieged Communist Party events in Dartmouth and Plymouth, injuring general secretary Harry Pollitt. Communist MP Phil Piratin replaced Pollitt at a reconvened Plymouth meeting.
He charmed the “good chaps in uniform”, recited a brief history of British plunder and aggression in China, before politely but firmly reprimanding those who had assaulted a “very fine working-class leader” one week earlier. He then accepted the offer to join some of the audience for a drink and a chat in the public house next door.
Communist parties across the world greeted the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949.
For Britain’s communists, “the Chinese revolution has freed hundreds of millions from the grip of the landlords and the foreign bankers”. Instead of a massive rearmament programme, Britain should pursue peaceful economic, political and cultural relations with countries choosing a socialist path.
A number of businesspeople, among them Communist Party members, led the first ever western trade mission to the People’s Republic in July 1953. This ‘Icebreaker Mission’, which is still recalled by China’s leaders, led to the formation of the 48 Group of British Traders with China.
Communist and left Labour MPs successfully urged the Attlee government to recognise Mao Zedong’s government. But before the end of 1950, British forces were fighting the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army in Korea. US troops, and others from satellite nations under a UN flag, had intervened to rescue the southern dictatorship from the northern Communists and were now advancing through People’s Korea towards China.
The CPGB conducted a courageous “Hands Off Korea” campaign of civil disruption as the Chinese forces joined their Korean allies in driving Western military forces back to Korea’s north-south partition line at the 38th parallel.
In its programme, The British Road to Socialism (1951), the CPGB condemned the Labour government for forming an imperialist “war bloc” with the Tories and American big capitalists against the Soviet Union, New China, Europe’s people’s democracies and the colonial peoples struggling for independence.
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