Democracy and Narodnism in China

Lenin’s article discussing the relation between bourgeois democracy and Narodnism in China, written on July 15, 1912. On the same day, it was published in Neva Star, issue No 17. The Chinese translation is included in Vol. 21 of the second revised edition of the Complete Works of Lenin.

At the beginning of the 20th century, capitalism developed and expanded to all across the world. After the Russian bourgeois-democratic revolution in 1905, movements of national liberation, democratic revolutions and social reforms in less developed countries swept all across Asia.

In 1911, the Xinhai Revolution broke out in China. The corrupt Qing Dynasty was overthrown. The autocratic monarchy of over 2,000 years old was ended and the Republic of China, as a bourgeois democratic republic, was established. All these have drawn worldwide attention. In July 1912, Lenin read Sun Yat-sen’s article “The Social Significance of Chinese Revolution” (the first half of Sun Yat-sen’s farewell speech to members of the Nanjing Tung Meng Hui in Nanjing on April 1, 1912. This speech transcript was translated into French and published in Belgium’s People’s Daily on July 11, 1912）.

This urged Lenin to examine the relationship between democracy and Narodnism in the contemporary bourgeois-democratic revolutions in Asia based on the new facts and events. This relationship was the most important issue since Russia’s 1905 Revolution. Therefore, Lenin wrote this article to explain the contradictory relationship between bourgeois democracy and Narodnism in China and to predict the future development of Chinese revolutions.

Lenin dialectically analyzed Sun Yat-sen’s revolutionary principles. He regarded Sun Yat-sen’s anti-feudal thoughts as progressive and revolutionary. At the same time, he revealed his mistaken ideas having the colors of utopian socialism. He pointed out that Sun Yat-sen was a revolutionary democrat full of lofty and heroic spirits compared with the presidents of the advanced countries of Europe and America who ended up serving as the puppets of the bourgeoisie.

In Sun Yat-sen’s “Three People’s Principles”, the fighting spirit and sincerity were everywhere. Sun Yat-sen did not belittle political freedom or allow China’s autocratic system to coexist with social reform and constitutional reform. These principles were complete democracy calling for a republican system. This democratic thought had exactly the same Narodnik nature as the Russian bourgeois democratic thought. Firstly, these principles of Sun Yat-sen were combined with utopian socialism and the utopian desire to prevent China from capitalism. Influenced by the European socialist movements, Sun Yat–sen and other revolutionary democrats opposed oppression and exploitation of the masses on the basis of the revolutionary sentiments of the peasants against feudal autocratic rule in China. This inevitably resulted in utopian socialism, which did not apply to a backward semi-feudal agricultural China and did not serve the primary task of overthrowing the feudal system and in fact served the development of capitalism.

Secondly, these principles were connected with the plan of promoting and implementing a radical land reform. Sun Yat-sen’s principle of equal land rights was theoretically a utopian theory by reactionary “socialists” of the petty bourgeoisie. This was because, in the final analysis, such land principle was to transfer land ownership to the state, or to nationalize the land. According to Marx’s theory, land nationalization under capitalism can eliminate absolute land rent and only retain differential land rent, thus allowing the greatest freedom in land trade and the fastest development of capitalism in agriculture. Therefore, the irony was that Sun Yat-sen’s land principle based on the subjective socialist theory of “preventing” capitalism was in fact an entire legal basis to “change the real estate” and a principle to eliminate feudal exploitation. It ended as the purest, the most thorough and complete capitalist principle.

This was the essence of Sun Yat-sen’s Narodnism, his bourgeois-democratic land reform principle and the so-called socialist theory. Lenin pointed out that such land principle or land nationalization policy that will ensure the fastest development of capitalism in backward China could only be implemented after a political revolution which will abolish the feudal system. Different countries achieved different degrees of democracy in politics and have resolved the question of land and peasants through their own specific bourgeois revolutions. The situations in each country were unique and complicated. The degree of deepening of bourgeois democracy would be determined by both the international situation and various social forces in China. Lenin argued that Sun Yat-sen and other revolutionary bourgeoise elements in various countries of the east were mobilizing peasants and making good use of their high initiative, firmness and decisiveness in political and land reforms in order to find the correct path to “revitalize” China.

Lenin predicted that as capitalism developed in China, more cities like Shanghai would emerge wherein capitalists would get richer and the proletariats poorer. He also predicted that the proletariat in China would also develop gradually and would definitely establish its own political party. When the proletariats criticized Sun’s petty-bourgeois utopianism and his reactionary views to draw up its own principle, they would probably carefully retain the core of revolutionary democracy in Sun’s political and land principles, and further develop these principles.