Leon Trotsky on China

“In 1925-27, a powerful revolutionary upsurge shook the cities and countryside of China, opening the possibility for working people in that country to take political power and follow the road of the October 1917 revolution in Russia.

But the revolution was crushed at the hands of Chiang Kai-shek and his bourgeois and landlord allies. A central cause of the defeat was the disastrous course of Joseph Stalin in subordinating the Chinese Communist Party to an alliance with the capitalist Nationalist Party (Kuomintang).

The articles and letters in this collection record Leon Trotsky’s fight to reverse this course, and then to draw the lessons of the defeat. Leon Trotsky on China also contains the communist leader’s writings in the 1930s on the centrality of China’s struggle against Japanese and US imperialism, and on the Chinese Red Army led by Mao Zedong.”