What’s the official stance of the Chinese Communist Party toward the 1911 revolution (and, by extension, toward early KMT figures like Sun Yat-Sen)?
I just saw an trailer on trailers.apple.com for a new movie produced in China about the event, filmed in mainland China, which seems odd to me (why would the government be celebrating the establishment of the government that it overthrew?), but I only have a cursory understanding of the politics involved.
Anyone have a better understanding of the situation?
The KMT established by Sun Yat-Sen and the KMT under Chiang Kai-Shek were somewhat different beasts. When Sun Yat-Sen died in 1925 he was still actively allied with the communists, was receiving aid from the USSR and ruled a party with distinct left and right wings. Chiang Kai-Shek shattered the alliance with the communists in 1927 and ultimately purged the left-wing of the party.
So Sun Yat-Sen is still revered as a revolutionary leader, while Chiang Kai-Shek is reviled as a right-wing warlord.
Both the Nationalist KMT and the Chinese Communists were radical socialist revolutionary movements that got off the ground in no small part due to substantial assistance from the Soviet Union/COMINTERN. The party structure of the KMT was set up along the same lines as the Communist party of the USSR, and the spiritual “home” of the KMT, the Whampoa military Acadamy where most future leaders on both the nationalist and communist sides were trained, was set up entirely by Soviet funding and staffed by Soviet officers. The army of the KMT and Taiwan today is still called the National Revolutionary Army for a reason.
The KMT and the Communists (under orders from the Soviet Union) co-operated in the Northern Expedition. After establishing nominal control over most of the country in the 1920s, the KMT was split internally into a “left” and a “right” wing, this split cumulated in the April 12th Incident of 1927, which in official Communist history is the point where the KMT went off the rails and became a “counter-revolutionary movement”, to use their parlance.
In the subsequent civil war the KMT obviously had no further Soviet support (barring the period between the Nazi-Soviet cooperation and the start of Barbarossa) and was largely reliant on military assistance from Nazi Germany. KMT armies were equipped and trained entirely with German officers and equipment. Chiang Kai Shek himself was supposedly a great admirer of Adolf Hitler, being a fellow anti-communist dictator of a once-great-power.
The Communist party itself also underwent a change. The pre-1927 CCP was largely an organization of urban workers and intellectuals, all trained and organized by the COMINTERN and various Russian and European Communist agents. Mao was a minor character in this period and played no significant role. This organization was largely destroyed by the KMT in 1927 and the subesequent civil war, and very few of the leaders involved in the initial founding the the party played any great role in the eventual establishment of the PRC in 1949, if they managed to survive at all. Most of these were foreign trained, pro-Soviet, advocated an urban uprising of workers(which failed) and considered Mao to be an uneducated Peasant. The result that the only Communist formation that managed to survive was the one under Mao, who was conspicuously NOT Soviet trained/advised (he was educated in the Chinese classics and never received any Western/European training) and never really got along with Stalin or the COMINTERN. This the subsequent antipathy between the PRC and the USSR after 1949.
It’s largely due to his staunch opposition to the idea of an independent Taiwan and insistence that Taiwan remain a part of China. Not unlike John McCain, you can disagree with his politics, but you can’t deny that he’s a patriot who loved his country.
