Thomas S. Bernard. Proletarian Hegemony in the Chinese Revolution and the Canton Commune of 1927

Lieberthal and Rogel Center for Chinese Studies, 1975. — 187 p.The Communist-organized Canton uprising of December 11, 1927, which proclaimed the Canton Commune or Soviet, proved to be a short-lived and disastrous affair lasting less than seventy-two hours. However, it immediately thereafter took on and long retained a meaningful symbolic role in the intricate fabric of ideological formulations, policies and strategies which marked the Chinese Communist movement and its relations with the Comintern during most of the decade following the collapse of the Commune. It was the Canton revolt, the Comintern proclaimed on the first anniversary of the Commune, which constituted “the banner of the new Soviet phase in the Chinese revolution.” A careful review of the political and rhetorical uses of the Canton Commune in both Comintern and Chinese Communist sources may throw some additional light on the complex and often ambiguous policy lines of the post-1927 soviet stage of Chinese Communism, particularly on the key issue of “proletarian hegemony” and its link to the urban-rural strategic relationship.