OSCAR PARRY explains why, despite the courage and determination of the masses, the revolution in China that began one hundred years ago this year ended in defeat.
The Chinese revolution of 1925-27 represented one of the most gigantic movements in human history. The multi-millioned Chinese masses, led by the Chinese working class, battered at the foundations of Chinese and imperialist landlordism and capitalism in their quest for liberation and a new society.
What should have been the Chinese revolution’s greatest asset, the October revolution in Russia in 1917 and the subsequent formation of the Communist International (Comintern), turned into a millstone around the neck of the Chinese working classes. In Russia, the working class came to power for the first time. However, Russia’s isolation and economic backwardness resulted in a bureaucratic degeneration. The mass participation in society that had characterised the first period after the revolution was increasingly replaced by the dictates of an administrative officialdom. The narrow domestic interests of the growing bureaucracy, personified by Stalin, increasingly dictated the policy of the Comintern. The profoundly mistaken policy it adopted during the Chinese revolution resulted in defeat, which in turn increased the isolation of the Soviet Union. This was the tragedy of the Chinese revolution.
Character of China
China at the end of the nineteenth century exhibited features of what Trotsky termed ‘combined and uneven development’; the most modern forms of capitalist production superimposed onto the fabric of the feudal past. That ancient fabric was tearing at the seams, China’s decaying social order balanced precariously on the backs of the peasantry, who were being crushed by rents to landlords, interest payments to merchants and moneylenders, and taxes to the state.
Into this unstable situation was thrust a new factor, the iron fist of Western capital, which no army of the imperial Emperors was capable of defeating. Economically, China was defenceless against this foreign conqueror, helped along by ‘gunboat diplomacy’ during the two opium wars of 1839-1842 and 1856-1860 waged by the imperialist powers to establish ‘spheres of influence’ and force open China’s closed economy. China was saved from outright colonisation only by the rivalry amongst the imperialists.
For China’s peasantry, this economic rampage was nothing short of catastrophic, resulting in mass pauperisation. But sections of the Chinese ruling class were growing fabulously wealthy by facilitating foreign trade, and a new ‘comprador’ class was born.
In 18th-century Europe it was the rising bourgeoisie which abolished feudal privileges and opened a path to capitalist development. One of the other main tasks of the classical bourgeois democratic revolution was the unification of the country, particularly important in China, which was divided between the fiefdoms of different armed groups in the North of the country, the ‘warlords’, and a weak government in Beijing. For these tasks to be completed, a battle with the interests of foreign imperialism was a vital prerequisite.
But in twentieth-century China the bourgeoisie was part of the problem, not the solution. Born from landlord and merchant elites, and deeply linked to both foreign and domestic landholding interests, Chinese capitalists exploited peasants directly. This left only one revolutionary vanguard: the urban working class. As China’s newest and most socially consistent class, only it could champion sweeping economic change, and link this with peasant agrarian risings for a united revolutionary struggle.
During 1917, Russia’s Bolsheviks had shown that this was possible: a disciplined party of workers could combine bourgeois democratic demands with socialism in a single revolution. That merger, telescoping bourgeois and socialist objectives, offered the only viable path forward for backward, semi-colonial societies like China. This was Trotsky’s theory of ‘permanent revolution’: only a proletarian-led revolution, allied with the peasantry, could break the old exploitative system and achieve socialist change.
The role of the Chinese working class in shaping the country’s political landscape was defined more by its strategic importance than by its numerical size. In 1925, two million industrial workers and ten million trade workers were a drop in the ocean in a country of over 400 million.
In the industrial centres of China, conditions for workers in both Chinese- and foreign-owned factories were brutal, reminiscent of the early stages of industrialisation in 19th-century Britain. Men, women, and children worked gruelling shifts of 12 to 16 hours for starvation wages, without basic protections or safety measures. An exploitative apprenticeship system provided workshops and small businesses with a steady supply of child labourers, many of whom worked for little more than food and a place to sleep.
Workers began to flood into trade unions during the Chinese revolution, seeing the possibility of fighting back against this oppression. By 1925, a million workers were on strike, with many demanding political reforms. The peasants began to organise under communist influence into giant peasant associations, struggling against landlords, police, soldiers and magistrates.
The emerging native capitalist class in China, sensing the danger to their own interests, sought to capture and direct this momentum for their own ends, even adopting revolutionary rhetoric to mask their true intentions. The main vehicle for this was the bourgeois nationalist political party, the Kuomintang (KMT), formed in 1912 by Sun Yat Sen.
The Chinese Communist Party
Inspired by the Russian revolution, Marxist groups in China came together to form the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1921, with Chen Duxiu elected as its leader. The CCP experienced explosive growth during the upsurge of the revolution. At the CCP-organised Second National Labour Congress in May 1925, delegates representing more than 570,000 workers were present.
One of the earliest and most pressing challenges facing the CCP was how to define its relationship, as a workers’ party, with the bourgeois nationalist KMT. In 1920, at the Second Congress of the Comintern, Lenin emphasised the crucial distinction between two types of nationalist movements in the oppressed nations. On the one side were bourgeois-democratic movements, led by sections of the native ruling classes, which would, at the crucial moment, ally with imperialist powers for their own benefit. On the other side were the proletarian revolutionaries. Lenin called on the true revolutionaries to “wage determined war against the attempt of all those quasi-Communist revolutionists to cloak the liberation movement in the backward countries with a Communist garb”.
Stalin and his coterie at the head of the Comintern had different ideas. They wanted the CCP in China to focus on strengthening the KMT. At the CCP’s third congress in June 1923, internal resistance to joining the KMT was effectively suppressed. The congress manifesto emphasised that the KMT should be positioned as the primary force behind the national revolution and should hold the leadership role. This shift in direction led the CCP toward subordinating itself to the bourgeois nationalists. The idea that social classes with conflicting interests could unite under a single political organisation relied on the belief that imperialist oppression created a shared national interest strong enough to bridge class divides.
To reduce its reliance on traditional warlords, the Whampoa Military Academy was established in May 1924 with Chiang Kai-shek at its head. This institution, funded and staffed by Soviet support, was designed to train a new generation of military leaders loyal to the nationalist cause. Soon afterwards, Russian weapons began arriving in Canton to support the growing army aligned with the reinvigorated KMT.
The Canton strike
When a supervisor in a Japanese-owned factory killed a communist Chinese worker near Shanghai, students and workers organised a demonstration on 30 May 1925, and the police opened fire. The massacre sparked an immediate and massive reaction. Shanghai shut down under a general strike. The protest spread rapidly. In Canton, more peaceful protesters were shot. In response, a boycott of British goods was launched, and another general strike was called. British-dominated Hong Kong was brought to a halt. All industry and trade ceased.
In Canton, striking workers took over buildings previously used for gambling and opium use, converting them into dormitories and communal kitchens. A strike force of 2,000 pickets was formed to maintain order and enforce the boycott. These strikers elected delegates who formed a council to coordinate the movement. This grassroots administration set up hospitals and schools, organised funds and resources, and even enforced justice through a strikers’ court. Law and order during the strike were maintained not by state officials but by worker pickets. This resembled the ‘soviets’ – workers’ councils that had emerged during the Russian revolution and became the embryo of a new society.
However, any challenge to the sanctity of private property risked shattering the alliance with the capitalist class, which the Comintern was promoting. The Chinese capitalist class had much to gain by aligning itself with the international prestige that came from association with the Comintern. Even influential business groups, like the Canton Chamber of Commerce, publicly echoed revolutionary slogans: ‘Long Live the World Revolution!’
The Northern Expedition
Now that the KMT had a base in Canton in the South of China, they were able to turn their attention to the remaining warlords, launching a military campaign titled the ‘Northern Expedition’. This campaign was possible only because of the mobilisation of workers and peasants, a movement brought to life and given direction by the determination and organising efforts of the CCP.
A formidable force had been forged. The pressing question now was: who would wield it, and to what end? Chinese society was entering a new phase of struggle, with social classes rapidly realigning and open conflict between them becoming unavoidable.
Foreign powers, meanwhile, were shaken by the scale and intensity of the mass mobilisations. Initially, they responded with force. But the backlash to violent repression only invigorated the revolutionary spirit. Instead of quashing dissent, gunfire provoked greater resistance, drawing thousands more into the struggle. As violent suppression failed to restore control, foreign governments began to explore diplomatic avenues. These gestures were not lost on the Chinese elite. With the working-class movement gaining strength and expanding its demands, many capitalists began to see compromise with foreign powers as preferable to losing power.
Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of the Whampoa Military Academy, emerged as the individual who would use these forces to his own ends. Chiang cultivated his prestige among the people, aided by Russian military assistance and support from the political left. Yet, when it came to assembling the actual mechanisms of power, he relied firmly on the right wing of the KMT, which was greatly influenced by foreign powers.
Chiang moved quickly to assert his control of the KMT. After staging a bloodless coup in Canton on March 20, he restructured the party, effectively curtailing the influence of Communist members. New rules limited their representation within party bodies and barred them from leading any departments. The CCP was required to submit its membership lists to the KMT leadership.
Chiang’s consolidation of power marked a decisive shift: the national liberation movement was now firmly under bourgeois command. This was precisely the danger Lenin had warned against for Communist movements in colonised or semi-colonial nations. Yet instead of resisting this turn, the Comintern under Stalin obscured the facts. They withheld news of the March coup, not only from the global Communist movement and rank-and-file members, but even from the leadership of the Comintern itself. The leader of the CCP, Chen Duxiu, proposed leaving the KMT, but this was immediately denounced.
End of the Canton strike
As the Northern Expedition set off, the workers in the rear of the army began to experience the ‘liberation’ they would feel under the KMT. In Canton, martial law was imposed. Civil liberties were suspended; labour organisations dismantled and strikes outlawed. Gangsters aligned with conservative interests formed a new ‘labour’ union that served as a tool of suppression. New laws banned workers from bearing arms, holding public meetings, or staging protests. The revolutionary institutions built in the earlier period were dismantled. Meanwhile, negotiations with Britain resumed behind the scenes. Unofficial contacts were renewed and talk of aiding the workers gave way to talk of loans. A $10 million British loan to the Canton government was floated, contingent on ending anti-British actions. On October 10, 1926, after fifteen months of militant struggle, the Canton government called off both the strike and the British boycott, without achieving a single worker demand.
The Chinese masses saw the Northern Expedition as a transformative moment that could improve their lives. The Communists, rather than dispel these illusions, allowed the masses to believe in the promise of change. The wave of popular enthusiasm helped propel the KMT’s forces swiftly forward. The momentum was overwhelming. Military strength was bolstered by a powerful propaganda network that helped break resistance ahead of the army’s arrival. At the frontlines, peasants fought fiercely, while railway and telegraph workers sabotaged enemy logistics.
Shanghai
In 1927, Shanghai’s working class responded to the Northern Expedition’s advance with an unprecedented wave of labour unrest. The Shanghai General Labour Union had to operate underground, and nearly every strike was met with arrests and police violence. Nonetheless, the protest movement grew stronger. The General Labour Union called several citywide general strikes. The response was immediate and overwhelming. The city was brought to a standstill: trams halted, ships lay idle, post offices shut down, and shops and factories closed their doors.
On March 21, the General Labour Union called another general strike and insurrection against the local warlord. Between half a million and 800,000 people took part. The revolt was carefully organised, with a militia of 5,000 workers divided into small squads. They began with only about 150 pistols, far too few. Most fighters armed themselves with makeshift weapons like clubs, knives, and axes. As the clashes escalated, many police and soldiers surrendered, handing over their weapons. The entire city joined the battle. By the end of the day, the workers had taken control of key infrastructure.
It was only after the working class of Shanghai had full control of the city that Chiang Kai-Shek marched his army in. Chiang had been working behind the scenes; a network of street criminals was now reshaped into a tool of political repression, taking on characteristics reminiscent of the Black Hundreds in Tsarist Russia. Plans were drawn to create fake unions, filled with hired thugs and underworld figures, quickly armed and turned loose to undermine and attack real labour organisations.
The challenge facing Chiang Kai-shek and his allies was clear: how could they wrest control of Shanghai from the organised labour movement and assert their own authority? Buoyed by their recent triumphs, the workers formed a powerful and confident force. A provisional administration had already been created, seemingly dominated by Communist influence and apparently prepared to govern Shanghai in the name of the workers. There was every indication that the workers could collaborate with the city’s stationed soldiers, who might be persuaded to join their cause. In truth, Chiang faced deep uncertainty; he could not be sure whether his forces would follow him if ordered to confront the workers head-on.
To the city’s workers, however, the arrival of the nationalist army was heralded by Communist leaders as a moment of liberation. In Moscow, the dominant message was one of reassurance, directed especially against figures like Trotsky and the Left Opposition, who warned of betrayal and urged the Chinese Communists to assert their independence from the KMT.
Just days before disaster struck, Stalin addressed a gathering of young Communists, asserting that imperialist actions in China had backfired. Rather than weakening the revolutionary cause, he claimed, foreign interference had intensified anti-imperialist sentiment, strengthened the unity of the KMT, and pushed the movement further to the left. He cited an old saying: “Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make blind”. The irony would soon become painfully clear.
The Comintern called on the CCP to inject ‘workers and peasants’ blood’ into the KMT, language that, in retrospect, carried a grim double meaning. As Trotsky would later note with bitter irony, it was indeed a ‘transfusion’ that was about to take place, but not the kind the Moscow leadership had envisioned.
Shanghai runs red with blood
Before dawn on April 12, armed gangs, posing as labour groups, attacked worker strongholds, brutally beating or executing defenders. Tragically, only after the decisive moment did the General Labour Union call for a general strike on 13 April. Tens of thousands of workers responded. They gathered peacefully, passed resolutions demanding justice, and organised a petition to military officials. The unarmed marchers were ambushed en route, mowed down by machine-gun fire and attacked by troops wielding bayonets and swords. The muddy streets ran with blood, and entire neighbourhoods were raided.
Meanwhile, in Moscow, members of the Comintern and the rank-and-file of affiliated parties had been kept largely unaware of the situation in China. When word of the Shanghai massacre reached them, it came as a shocking revelation. Initially silent, the Comintern eventually issued statements defending the policy course taken.
Chiang Kai-shek’s violent takeover in Shanghai delivered a severe setback to the revolutionary movement, though it didn’t have to be its death knell. There was still an opportunity to unify and direct the remaining revolutionary forces. However, without a serious reassessment of revolutionary strategy and a recognition of how it had failed, a genuine resurgence was out of reach. In Trotsky’s eyes, continuing to submit the CCP to the authority of the KMT amounted to preparing the ground for further disasters. He called for the complete independence of the CCP, both politically and organisationally. A vital task was the building of soviets to coordinate the movement. Yet these warnings were suppressed. His positions were labelled dangerous deviations. Meanwhile, Stalin’s line was presented as the only acceptable framework, and the CCP was ordered to maintain unity with the ‘Left’ KMT based in Wuhan.
The peasant movement accelerates
In the countryside, a wave of peasant uprising had shaken the foundations of the old landed order. Local peasant unions had seized control of vast estates. These early gains now desperately required centralised support: a unified revolutionary force that could equip the peasants, protect their victories, and expand them. But when the rural elites realised that the government in Wuhan lacked both the resolve and the strength to support the peasantry, their confidence returned. Reactionary forces regrouped, their counteroffensive soon taking on a disciplined and militarised character.
Reports from villages were horrifying. In one county, peasants were doused with kerosene and burned alive; in another, hot irons were used to torture and kill. Elsewhere, victims were tied to trees, their bodies mutilated and salted before death. The cruelty exhibited by the reaction far exceeded anything perpetrated by the masses.
In Wuhan, the Communists accepted full participation in the national government, sharing administrative roles and joining joint policy meetings with the ‘left’ KMT leaders. In place of building their own base of support, Communist leaders deferred to the KMT. They discouraged strikes, accepted government-imposed arbitration, and discouraged labour unions from taking militant action. Even when the capitalists engaged in economic sabotage by closing factories or inflating prices, the party urged restraint. Workers, whose wage gains were being erased by massive inflation, responded instinctively, taking over abandoned workshops. But these initiatives were stopped by the authorities.
Two Communist ministers were appointed in Wuhan, tasked with agriculture and labour. Neither office passed any reform to ease the burden on the working class. No meaningful legislation was drafted or debated. Instead, these ministries operated like any other bureaucratic agency, enforcing the status quo while criticism of government policy was suppressed. The Comintern’s doctrine of unity with the KMT left took precedence over the CCP’s own goals. As a result, the party relinquished its class role and revolutionary mission.
The deepening class conflict drove Wuhan KMT politicians closer to the propertied classes. Armed forces aligned with landlords reasserted control. In places like Changsha, repression escalated into mass executions. By mid-1927, tens of thousands of rural activists, villagers, and peasant leaders had been killed in brutal crackdowns.
The revolution defeated
On 15 July, the KMT issued a formal directive expelling all Communists from the party. Execution squads quickly enforced this order. Many Communists who resisted had to flee. Overwhelmed by the impossibility of reconciling Moscow’s instructions, Chen Duxiu stepped down from leadership, stating that the Comintern had forced the CCP into an impossible contradiction.
With the collapse of Wuhan’s government, the Comintern ordered a tactical shift. Communists were told to leave the Wuhan government symbolically, but not to quit the KMT entirely. The directive called on the remaining cadres to intensify grassroots organising, rebuild unions, reignite the agrarian movement, and prepare the working class for a new phase of struggle, all while operating illegally under increasing repression.
But the Chinese Communists were left questioning how to rebuild from ruin. The organisations they had constructed were destroyed, their members scattered or dead, and their support among workers and peasants deeply eroded. A few communists attempted isolated uprisings, but they were quickly crushed. Stalin, far removed from the consequences, had dictated a strategy that ultimately devastated one of the largest mass movements in modern history.
The counterrevolution deepened in the following weeks. Trade unions across provinces were dismantled and organisers were hunted, imprisoned, or executed. What had begun as a sweeping revolution, a vast popular uprising that had shaken the foundations of China’s old regime, was now over.
The same banner that had inspired millions to rise, combining the insignia of the KMT with the revolutionary rhetoric of the Communists, was now flying over prisons and execution sites. Under its cover, the Chinese bourgeoisie secured power. Under it, the workers and peasants who had fought for liberation were suppressed. The CCP, lashed to the same flagpole as the KMT by the policies of the Comintern, had become collateral in a revolution that had turned against its own promise.
In a short span of years, a vast and powerful movement swept through China’s cities and countryside, threatening the foundations of its decaying social structure. But instead of being encouraged to act independently, the working masses were directed into alliances with their class enemies. Rather than uniting the authority of the October revolution behind the working class, the Soviet leadership under Stalin lent it to China’s national capitalists. As a result, the revolutionary wave was halted, its organisations crushed, and its leaders eliminated. The structures of exploitation, though shaken, remained intact. This marked the great tragedy of the Chinese revolution, a massive popular uprising criminally misdirected by those who should have been its champions.
China 1925-1927 timeline
1919 (May 4) May Fourth Movement Sparked by student protests against the Versailles Treaty’s award of Shandong to Japan.
1920 (mid-year) Early Communist Groups formed Under influence of Comintern agents, Marxist study circles appear in Shanghai, Beijing, Changsha, and elsewhere.
1921 (July 23–31) Founding of the Communist Party of China (CCP) 13 delegates meet secretly in Shanghai, Chen Duxiu elected leader
1922 (Jan) First Congress of the Chinese Labor Movement Chinese trade union movement accelerates under communist influence
1923 (Jan) Kuomintang (KMT) and Soviet Union sign alliance Sun Yat Sen agrees to Soviet aid and guidance; beginning of the ‘First United Front’ between the CCP and KMT
1923 (Oct) Sun reorganizes Kuomintang With Comintern advisor Mikhail Borodin, Sun reorganises the KMT, pushing centralisation, party discipline, military focus.
1924 (Jan) First National Congress of the Kuomintang Alliance of Communists and Nationalists formalised – policy of ‘Bloc within the KMT’. Sun Yat-sen issues his ‘Three Principles of the People’.
1924 (May–June) Whampoa Military Academy founded Soviet-financed, commanded by Chiang Kai-shek; trained officers for National Revolutionary Army (NRA).
1925 (Jan) Death of Sun Yat-sen Political vacuum in KMT; struggle for leadership between left (Wang Jingwei) and right (Chiang Kai-shek).
1925 (May 30) May 30 Movement (Shanghai) British police kill Chinese protesters leading to nationwide strikes, anti-imperialist and anti-foreign wave; workers’ movement grows rapidly.
1925 (June–Nov) Canton–Hong Kong General Strike Over 200,000 workers strike for months; forms Workers’ Government in Canton.
1926 (March 20) Canton Coup Chiang Kai-shek seizes control of the army, arrests Communist advisers; begins purge of leftists in military.
1926 (July 9) Northern Expedition begins National Revolutionary Army (NRA) marches from Guangzhou to unify China and defeat warlords. Initially successful; CCP organizes strikes and peasant movements in support.
1926 (Autumn) Victories in Hunan, Hubei, Jiangxi NRA takes major southern provinces; CCP influence spreads; peasant associations surge.
1927 (Jan–Mar) Approach to Shanghai Workers stage major strikes; CCP prepares insurrection in coordination with NRA advance.
1927 (Mar 21–22) Shanghai Insurrection Communist-led workers seize Shanghai; establish control briefly awaiting Chiang’s entry.
1927 (April 12) Shanghai Massacre (White Terror) Chiang Kai-shek turns on Communists; mass executions of workers and party members; thousands killed in Shanghai and other cities. Marks break of the ‘First United Front’.
1927 (Apr–Jun) Wuhan Government formed Left KMT faction under Wang Jingwei and Communist allies set up regime at Wuhan.
1927 (July 15) Wuhan Purge of Communists Wang Jingwei, under pressure, expels Communists; completes national counterrevolution. CCP forced underground.
1927 (Aug 1) Nanchang Uprising CCP forces revolt against KMT; first major armed action of the CCP; precursor to the Red Army.
1927 (Sept 9) Autumn Harvest Uprising (Hunan-Jiangxi) Mao Zedong leads peasant-based rebellion; defeated; retreats to Jinggangshan mountains.
1927 (Dec 11-13) Canton commune Last urban insurrection led by CCP and Comintern; briefly holds city before being crushed. Marks end of the 1925–27 revolutionary wave.