BOOK REVIEWS

Steve Smith, A Road is Made: Communism in Shanghai. 1920-1927

This is a very attractive volume with its 226 pages of text, and 315 pages overall. It includes two indices, one for proper names, and the other for objects or institutions, although the Chinese characters for these are unfortunately lacking. The map of Shanghai in 1927 is original, and shows the principal locations of the “tragedy of the Chinese revolution”, namely the episode that occurred in the city in March and April of that year. After twenty years of historical revelations following the opening of the Shanghai municipal archives in situ, of the archives of the Shanghai Municipal Police in Washington DC, and of the Communist International in Moscow (1), this researcher has at his disposal a sharp focus on that part of the Chinese revolution that occurred in the lower Yangtse basin. Following on from such ground-breaking works on this topic as Harold Isaacs' Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution in 1938 and through to Jean Chesneaux's Mouvement ouvrier chinois 1919-1927 in 1962 (2), the last fifteen years of the twentieth century have seen the appearance of a second wave of works on the social and political history of Shanghai, all of which are to be found in Steve Smith's excellent bibliography. His work draws up a kind of summarising balance sheet, but in the form of a narrative that restores the temporal element, all too often pushed into the background by contemporary trends in the social sciences. In this way, the author has been able to give us a new, or rather a totally renewed, presentation of the factually well-known events: May 25th 1925, the three uprisings from 1926 to 1927, and the anti-communist putsch of April 12th 1927. His book contains precious information on the analyses of the events made in the heat of the moment by the main protagonists themselves, including the Communist leaders on the spot and in Moscow, and it provides valuable biographical accounts of various lesser known activists in the workers' movement. This would be a fine achievement in itself. But a further interest in this book arises from the author's personal approach. In previous work he has taken a close interest in the revolutionary movement and the workers of Saint Petersburg between 1905 and 1917, and here he provides illuminating comparative parallels between these two revolutions, both of which had a strong working class component and were characterised in various ways by the participation of young intellectuals seeking to “awaken” the proletariat. Steve Smith's conclusions provide a more precise confirmation of what recent research has already more or less established: 1. The agents of the Communist International played a decisive role in transforming the network of more or less Marxist study groups into communist cells, particularly in financial terms (p. 33); 2. The movement of May 30th 1925 did indeed play a fundamental role in entrenching the Chinese Communist Party, but communist historians have covered up the decisive control over the movement by the Chamber of Commerce, and particularly by Yu Yaqing; 3. More generally, the non-communist or anti-communist activist trade union workers exercised an often decisive influence between 1920 and 1925, and they remained in positions of influence during the revolutionary wave of 1925-1927; 4. Communist influence, by contrast, was fragile and often at the service of the secret societies and other traditional social structures. The pages dealing with the disciplinary bodies of the jiuchadui (revolutionary unions), which were especially undisciplined and politically uncontrolled, are particularly illuminating (pp. 156-158). The disquiet they aroused in the communist leadership, as revealed by internal Party documents cited by Smith, was previously unknown to investigators in this field. In sum, this book introduces us to the very basis of a movement that has too often been interpreted in purely political terms, particularly within the perspective of the conflict between Stalin and Trotsky. The result is a truly liberating work (3).

Translated from the French original by Jonathan Hall