In the past, there seems to have been an agreement for division of labor between Chinese and U.S. scholars on mainland China studies: The Chinese concentrated on internal affairs and the Americans on the Communist International (Comintern) and the Soviet Union. This was due to the fact that Chinese scholars had easier access to more Chinese documents. The Americans had less difficulty with the language in which most of the Communist literature was written. This situation has changed dramatically in the last three years. The Americans have copies of most of the documents that we keep, especially since the Shih Shou Archives were put on film. Because of the American collection efforts, especially those of the Hoover Institute, many original documents of which we do not have copies have passed into U.S. hands.
The research environment in the United States is better than that in Taiwan. Many U.S. government and private institutions provide fellowships or research grants and permit use of the documents. Government authorities publish documents which have been declassified. Duplicating machines and filming have facilitated exchange of documents by research institutions.
U.S. scholars have another important advantage. Most have an adequate training in basic Marxist theory as undergraduates or graduate students. Though some may not have mastered Marxism, I have not met anyone unacquainted with the basic theory. This is not quite the case in Taiwan. Because of the Communist threat, our government has banned books on Marxism. No college or university offers a course in Marxism. Young scholars lack the basic theoretical knowledge. This has led scholars to go to the United States if they want to study mainland China. For this reason, two special institutes have been set up in Taiwan.
Dov Bing, whose work is reviewed in this article, is a product of the research environment in the United States and other Western countries. Mr. Bing is a Ph. D. candidate in Chinese History from Auckland University of New Zealand. With the assistance of the Dutch security agencies, he acquired documents concerning G. Maring. These prompted him to concentrate his studies on Maring and the Chinese Revolution. He came to Taipei to collect further information and to the Institute of International Relations to have a talk with me.
In recent years, I have declined to talk with foreign visitors on Chinese Communist affairs. The reason is simple. Those who come to Taipei may have a complicated background. I do not know what they will report after they return to their own countries. Some of them might be Communists and deliberately misquote me.
I accepted Dov Bing's request because the topic was Maring. He knew I had written an article entitled "G. Maring and Two Communist Parties" in the Indonesian language. Mr. Bing first showed me the Xeroxed copy of my article "G. Maring and Two Communist Parties," which first was published in the Democratic Review of Hongkong, Vol. III, Nos. 18-19. It was the first article by a Chinese research fellow to report the activities of "Sneevliet" in the Dutch East Indies under the pseudonym G. Maring. One of the purposes of writing the article was to let people know what kind of person Maring was and why he advocated that young Chinese Communists live parasitically in the Kuomintang. Later I found many questions concerning Maring's activities in China unanswered. Dov Bing's study answered most of them.
Later he showed me his materials and the photocopies the Dutch gave him. These documents contained much information previously unknown to Chinese scholars, including: 1) Maring's activities in China were recorded in detail by Dutch security agencies, and the agencies also have a duplicate copy of Maring's letter to a lady in the East Indies; 2) the Dutch Consulate in Shanghai had letters from the Public Concession and French Concession in Shanghai informing it of Maring's residence, including the name of the hotel and places he stayed. 3) The Dutch Foreign Ministry had informed the Northern Chinese Government of Maring's arrival in China, and the Northern Chinese Government had issued a notice; Dov Bing has a duplicate copy of the notice. 4) After the CCP came into being, Maring went to Moscow and submitted a report to the Executive Committee of the Comintern. The report is an extremely important document bearing on the question of cooperation between the KMT and the CCP. From that report, one finds that the description of the KMT by N.I. Bukharin and J. V. Stalin as not a political party but a bloc of four classes was an invention of Maring. 5) Maring wrote memoirs after his interviews with Dr. Sun Yat-sen in Kweilin, Shanghai and Canton. 6) Maring's accompanying of Adolph Joffe to China was tacitly approved by Joffe. After Maring went back to Moscow, he suggested returning the China Eastern Railway to China. His suggestion was discussed with Bukharin, Stalin, Trotsky and others, and Stalin resolutely opposed it. 7) It was Maring who introduced Joffe to Dr. Sun Yat-sen. Before the Sun-Joffe talks, Maring made frequent trips between Shanghai and Peiping, arranging the details of the Sun-Joffe Joint Statement. 8) The 13-point Directive issued by the Executive Committee of the Comintern to the CCP Central Committee was based on Maring's report. 9) When Dr. Sun returned to Canton after defeating Ch'en Chiung-ming, Maring also came to Canton. During the period, Maring met and talked with Dr. Sun several times a week, discussing the reform of the KMT and the assignment of Soviet military advisers to China. Prior to this the two sides had also talked about the visit of a Chinese delegation to the Soviet Union and the sending of a Soviet adviser to China. Presumably the official visit of Chiang Kai-shek, then chief of staff of the National Revolutionary Army, to Moscow and the assignment of Michael Borodin to China were doings of Maring. 10) Maring returned to Moscow before the KMT’s First National Convention. Shortly thereafter, he seems to have been relieved of the post of council member of the Comintern's Far East Bureau at Vladivostok. The reason why he left the Comintern for good at this time is not known.
After reviewing the materials, I thanked Mr. Bing for his generosity in showing them to me.
First, whence did Maring come when he went to Kweilin? Did he go from Canton as Chang Chi put it in his memoirs? Dov Bing said he did not know. I told him that I believed Maring went from Changsha to Kweilin. I know of this proof: a letter from Chao Heng-t'i, then the ruler of Hunan province, to Tan Yen-k'ai dated December 19, 1921, which said in part, "Maring of the Netherlands has arrived in Changsha and is planning to go to Kweilin in a few days." During the Japanese War, I once traveled by sedan along that road. My experience told me that it would take less than a day to go from Changsha to Kweilin if not required to obtain an entry permit to cross the Huangsha River on the border between Hunan and Kwangsi provinces. Before the highway was built, the trip would have required two to three days on foot. At the time of Maring's trip, the road had not been built. Maring should have arrived in Kweilin between December 22 or 23, 1921. This estimate coincides with the arrival date of December 23 reported in Revolutionary Documents Vol. IX, p. 211. If Maring departed from Changsha for Kweilin via Hankow, Shanghai and Canton, he could not have arrived in Kweilin December 23. At that time, waiting for boats at a single port might take three to four days.
Dov Bing asked me where he could see Chao Heng-t'i's letter. I told him that I had not seen the original letter but that a friend once showed me a duplicate and that the original was at the Academia Sinica in Taipei. Dov Bing later obtained a Xeroxed copy of that letter.
Second, I asked him about Maring's salary demands. I had learned that after Maring left Moscow, he sent a letter to Li Ta-chao from Hamburg, Germany, on August 15, 1924, saying that he had had 10 years' experience in Communist propaganda while serving with the Workers Association, and that if the CCP would invite him, he would ask a monthly salary of 300 to 400 Chinese dollars. Mr. Bing was surprised; he had never heard of it before. I told him that he could find it in the Collection of Soviet Conspiracy Documents and Proofs, Vol. 348.
Third, I told Dov Bing that the documents kept in Taiwan concerning Maring's memoirs were contradictory and that his documents provided some enlightenment. I said I suspected what Chang Chi had said that Maring thought the motive of revolution was "hatred" instead of "love." I said Maring was a member of the Dutch Social Democratic Party and had relations with the Bolsheviks only later, and that in general the Marxists of the Second International considered revolution as a work to liberate a majority oppressed by others. Mr. Bing made no comment; he had not seen Chang Chi's writing.
After he returned to Australia, Mr. Bing wrote me that he had quoted me in his work but did not tell me what he quoted. Several months ago, I read his article entitled "Sneevliet and the Early Years of the CCP" published in the China Quarterly No. 48. I doubted what he said about the First Plenum of the three CCP Central Committee meetings.
In the article, he said, "Sneevliet left Peking for Shanghai on 29 March 1922 and, as soon as he arrived, arranged for a series of conferences with the leadership of the CCP and the KMT. His talks with the Central Committee of the KMT resulted in an assurance that they would allow the Chinese Communists to make Communist propaganda within the KMT. For the CCP these talks resulted in the as yet unreported First Hangchow Plenum held at the West Lake in Hangchow." His assertion was based on Maring's report to the Executive Committee of the Comintern, which was written in Moscow on July 11, 1922. Did Maring's report conform to the facts?
By "leadership of the KMT" presumably is meant the KMT’s key leaders in Shanghai. I can hardly believe that they would give such an assurance. From the very outset, the KMT leaders favored only the acceptance of Soviet aid, not the admission of Chinese Communists into the KMT, much less approving Chinese Communist propaganda within the KMT. Those KMT leaders were great statesmen experienced in political struggle, not innocent children to be easily cheated. Tai Chi-t'ao, who studied Marxism with Ch'en Tu-hsiu and other Chinese Communist leaders, even opposed accepting Soviet money.
The time of the First Hangchow Plenum was estimated by Dov Bing according to the reported activities of Maring. He said, "Maring departed from Peiping to Shanghai on April 2, and again departed from Shanghai on April 23. Thus the plenum should have been held sometime between April 3-22. The leading participants at the conference were Ch'en Tu-hsiu, Li Ta-ehao, Chang Kao-t'ao, Chu Ch'iu-pai, Mao Tse-tung and Sneevliet. Maring did not mention Mao Tse-tung by name, but only said in his report," … one other, a very capable Hunanese student whose name I do not remember." Dov Bing believed the Hunanese student to be Mao and said, "There were two such possible Hunanese students in the Party at that time, Ts'ai Ho-shen and Mao Tse-tung. Since Ts'ai only returned from France in June 1922, it must have been Mao who attended."
As we know, at the First Congress of the CCP, three Central Committee members were elected; they were: Ch'en Tu-hsiu (secretary), Chang Kuo-t'ao (organization) and Li Ta (propaganda). We do not know if there were alternate members elected, much less who they were. However, we could assume that Li Ta-chao was an alternate member who might have been present at the plenum at the West Lake.
Chu Chiu-pai's supposed presence deserves further reflection. Chu was hospitalized in Petrograd after attending the Far East Workers' Congress in 1921. He was carried to Moscow on a litter aboard a train on February 7, 1922. He returned to China with Ch'en Tu-hsiu in January of the following year. His participation in the CCP probably began at the end of 1922. He could not have attended the Hangchow Plenum.
Dov Bing has good reason to believe that the capable Hunanese student was not Li Ta. Li Ta was disgusted at Maring's arrogance, according to Chang Kuo-t'ao. And if he had gone to the meeting, Maring would not have forgotten his name, since they had met many times before.
At that time, Mao Tse-tung was not a Central Committee member but a provincial cadre in the CCP. According to Li Jui in his "Comrade Mao Tse-tung's Early Revolutionary Activities," p. 177, Mao once went to Shanghai and stayed there for a short while to organize a propaganda campaign against Chao Heng-t'i for Chao's execution of Communist members Huang Ai and Pang Jen-chuan. Li Jui also said that Mao proceeded to Hengyang on May 2 to arrange for a meeting commemorating the May 4th Movement in the Hunan Provincial Third Normal School (ibid., p.151). Mao could have been in Shanghai in March-April of 1922. However, whether Mao was qualified to participate in a plenum of the CCP Central Committee is another matter. If Mao was there, where was Liu Jen-ching, who was much more important at the time in terms of position and responsibility? We can hardly believe in the truthfulness of Maring's report.
After this plenum Maring departed China for Moscow on April 23 aboard the Japanese SS Kagoshima Maru. On July 17, he told the Executive Committee of the Comintern that he had talked the CCP Central Committee into approving the participation of Chinese Communists in the KMT at the plenum, though his proposal had met with some opposition. Maring emphasized that the KMT was made up of intellectuals, most of whom took part in the 1911 Revolution, overseas capitalists, soldiers of the southern army and workers in South China. In view of the KMT’s loose organization, and based on his experience in Java, Maring believed that only by participating in the KMT could the Communists representing the working class become powerful. The Executive Committee accepted Maring's suggestion and directed the CCP Central Committee to move to Canton and keep in close touch with Maring. This directive in effect endowed Maring with full power to manipulate the CCP's strategy.
With this Comintern directive, Maring came to Peiping with Joffe on August 12 and later proceeded to Shanghai. There they urged Ch'en Tu-hsiu to convene what Dov Bing called the Second Hangchow Plenum at West Lake on August 17. After the close of the plenum the following day, Maring returned to Shanghai. On August 25, he met Dr. Sun Yat-sen for the second time at the latter's residence in the French Concession.
In his "Statement to All Chinese Communist Party Comrades," Ch'en Tu-hsiu said, "Shortly after the dismissal of the CCP's Second Congress, the Comintern sent representative to China, asking the CCP Central Committee to hold a plenary session at the West Lake. In the meeting, the representative proposed that the Chinese Communists join the KMT. He asserted that the KMT was not a party of the bourgeoisie but 'a bloc of various classes.'" Maring's proposal immediately met with opposition from Ch'en Tu-hsiu, Chang Kuo-t'ao and Tsai Ho-shen. Because of Maring's pressure, the resolution was finally adopted. The adoption, which was contrary to the position taken at the Second Plenum, presumably had something to do with the directive of Executive Committee of the Comintern. For this, Ch'en Tu-hsiu had more to say: "At that time, the five CCP Central Committee members namely Li Shou-chi (Li Ta-chao), Chang Te-li (Chang Kuo-t'ao), Tsai Ho-shen, Kao Chun-yu (Kao Shang-teh) and I were all opposed to this proposal. Our primary reason for the opposition was this: Alliance with another party would mix up the class organization, thus containing our independent policy. However, the Comintern representative later demanded that the CCP should comply with the decision of the Comintern. To respect international Communist discipline, the meeting reluctantly accepted the proposal for participating in the KMT." But in 1935, Maring told Harold R. Isaacs at Amsterdam that "most of the CCP Central Committee members accepted his recommendation," and that among many of those who had agreed to join the KMT much earlier, Ch'en Tu-hsiu was one." In the meantime, Isaacs also said that Maring denied having carried out international discipline. Besides, Isaacs added, "I issued no special directive at all." (See "The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution," Revised Edition, 1951, p. 59) To support Maring's statement, Chang Kuo-t'ao in his talk with Martin Wilbur, a professor of Columbia University, in Hongkong in November, 1954, said Maring did not overtly exercise the authority of the Comintern at the meeting. We cannot be sure, however, that Maring did not exert pressure on Ch'en Tu-hsiu privately.
In any event, the documents quoted by Dov Bing prove that Maring lied. He had a 13-point directive of the Comintern which ordered the Chinese Communists to Join the KMT. How could he deny this? With this directive in his hands, it would be implausible for him not show it when his proposal met with opposition from most of the Central Committee members present. It is well known that Ch'en Tu-hsiu favored cooperation "outside the KMT" instead of "inside the KMT." After defeating his opponents, Maring moved to ask the meeting to reprove Chang Kuo-t'ao, a co-founder of the CCP.
Maring's insistence on the CCP's participation in the KMT makes sense. He was a Marxist of the Second International, not a Bolshevist. Hence, like Karl Kautsky he thought backward countries would first develop into capitalist countries before they could become socialist. At that time, China was a sub-colony. To pass through this historical stage, she must first oppose imperialists and get rid of warlords. Since the KMT headed by Dr. Sun Yat-sen was already a well-established party moving along the right path, and since it was then assisting sailors in a general strike, both the Comintern and the Soviet Union should render assistance to it and should call off their Irkutsk Line that favored uniting with Wu P'ei-fu. As to what the CCP should do in the KMT's struggle for accomplishing its National Revolution, Maring observed that the young Chinese Communists, once admitted, should make every effort to develop the CCP's strength by taking advantage of the loose organization of the KMT. This observation was based on the Java Communist Party's experience in uniting with the Moslem League for anti-Dutch struggle. Maring seems not to have anticipated the subsequent power struggle between the KMT and the CCP. When he witnessed the difficult situation confronting the CCP in the "February 7th Incident," he became surer of his views. Soviet authorities were divided on the question of whether the CCP should join the KMT. However, although they may not have wholly approved Maring's report, they did come to a consensus: The new-born CCP, in a vast China where the strength of industrial workers was weak, could not accomplish much. The KMT's leader, Dr. Sun Yat-sen, was a renowned democratic revolutionist, whereas Ch'en Tu-hsiu was little known in the international socialist movement. If Maring's experience in Java was meaningful, then regarding the KMT in the light of the Moslem League was to the CCP's advantage.
During the period from the CCP Central Committee plenum at West Lake (referred to as the Second Hangchow Plenum by Dov Bing) to the reorganization of the KMT, Maring worked whole-heartedly for his advocacy. His activities were more favorable to the KMT than to the CCP. As Ch'en Tu-hsiu put it, Maring's work was aimed at turning the CCP into "coolies" of the KMT We do not know why Maring chose to quit working for the Comintern after successfully accomplishing his mission.
I esteem Dov Bing's research, which has contributed considerably to the study of the CCP's history by depicting in detail Maring's activities and achievements. Bing's failure, if any, would be an enthusiasm for invention which is common to all American China experts. By invention, I mean the "CCP Central Committee's First Hangchow Plenum" and several other unimportant matters. ─Wu Chen-tsai