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Memorandum by the Second Secretary of Embassy in China (Davies)
How Red Are the Chinese Communists?
The Chinese Communists are backsliders. They still acclaim the infallibility of Marxian dogma and call themselves Communists. But they have become indulgent of human frailty and confess that China’s communist salvation can be attained only through prolonged evolutionary rather than immediate revolutionary conversion. Like that other eminent backslider, Ramsay MacDonald,55 they have come to accept the inevitability of gradualness.
Yenan is no Marxist New Jerusalem. The saints and prophets of Chinese Communism, living in the austere comfort of caves scooped out of loess cliffs, lust after the strange gods of class compromise and party coalition, rather shame-facedly worship the Golden Calf of foreign investments and yearn to be considered respectable by worldly standards.
All of this is more than scheming communist opportunism. Whatever the orthodox communist theory may be about reversion from expedient compromise to pristine revolutionary ardor, the Chinese communist leaders are realistic enough to recognize that they have now deviated so far to the right that they will return to the revolution only if driven to it by overwhelming pressure from domestic and foreign forces of reaction.
There are several reasons for the moderation of the Communists.
- 1.
- They are Chinese. Being Chinese, they are, for all of their early excesses, temperamentally inclined to compromise and harmony in human relationships.
- 2.
- They are realists. They recognize that the Chinese masses is 90% peasantry; that the peasantry is semi-feudal—culturally, economically and politically in the middle ages; that not until China has developed through several generations will it be ready for communism; that the [Page 670] immediate program must therefore be elementary agrarian reform and the introduction of political democracy.
- 3.
- They are nationalists. In more than seven years of bitter fighting against a foreign enemy the primary emotional and intellectual emphasis has shifted from internal social revolution to nationalism.
- 4.
- They have begun to come into power. And [As?] has been the experience in virtually all successful revolutionary movements, accession to power is bringing a sobering realization of responsibility and a desire to move cautiously and moderately.
Chinese Communist moderation and willingness to make concessions must not be confused with softness or decay. The Communists are the toughest, best organized and disciplined group in China. They offer cooperation to Chiang out of strength, not out of weakness.
- J. Ramsay MacDonald, leader of the British Labor Party, was British Prime Minister 1924, 1929–31, 1931–35, the third time after forming coalition government.↩