The Guangzhou Uprising, 11-13 December 1927
Within two days after it was launched on 11 December 1927, the Guangzhou Uprising was reversed. In the ensuing five days, the city was the scene of a pitiful massacre of radical men, women and children; an estimated five-six thousand insurrectionaries were to lose their lives, murdered in many cases in the most vengefully gruesome manner.By Arif Dirlik
At 3:30 a.m. on 11 December 1927, military units and worker red guards under Communist control launched an uprising in Guangzhou (Canton). Around six o'clock that morning, when the uprising had achieved control over most of Guangzhou, the Communist leadership announced the formation of a Guangzhou Soviet. The Soviet became official when it was ratified at a mass meeting the following day, but, by then, the uprising was already in retreat. Zhang Tailei, the moving force behind the uprising, was assassinated as he returned from the meeting. By four o'clock on the thirteenth, Guangzhou was recaptured by warlord armies and their worker allies.In the next year, most of the young revolutionaries-products of the May Fourth Movement-who had participated in the revolutionary movement in Guangzhou would lose their lives to white terror. The Guangzhou Soviet would come to be known in subsequent years as the 'Guangzhou Commune,' after the Paris Commune of 1871 which had inspired it ('The Paris Commune of the East'). It was the third of the revolutionary defeats of 1927 (along with the Nanchang and the Autumn Harvest Uprisings) that nearly extinguished the Communist Party, but have nevertheless been celebrated as the beginnings of a new strategy and a new revolutionary force that would bring the Communists to power in 1949. The Uprising, and the revolutionary movement that led to it, in particular the Canton-Hong Kong Strike of 1925-1926, are significant events in what they have to tell us about the history of the Communist revolution in China. But this study is intended further as an inquiry into revolution as a historical phenomenon. In our post-revolutionary age, scholarship on revolutions has turned away from the teleologies that informed revolutions to uncovering their incoherence and the chaos that they wrought. While there was incoherence and chaos aplenty in an event such as the Guangzhou Uprising, I believe that it is necessary for the historian to examine the ways in which revolutionaries themselves sought to overcome the chaos and the incoherence (which they recognized), while at the same time questioning the teleology that guided them.
'Place-based'
There are two aspects to this undertaking. First is the narrativization of revolution around different spatialities. My interest in the Guangzhou Uprising was kindled by the differences of local narratives of revolution from national narratives as represented in local and national (Beijing) museums of revolution. The question of the local versus the national has received considerable attention from historians of the Chinese revolution. In most cases, however, local narratives are absorbed into national narratives, dismissed for their deviations from the latter, or utilized to question the revolutionariness of the national revolution. much the same may be said of the relationship of the national revolution to the international revolutionary movement of which it was conceived to be part. I argue that it is important to identify alternative narrativizations while also recognizing that the histories constructed by different narratives also intersect with and inform one another. These intersections unavoidably have concrete locations which are not self-enclosed localities but sites where many forces (and histories) come together; hence my preference for 'place-based' over the more restrictive term, 'local.' The Guangzhou Uprising was very much place-based, but it was not just local. To be sure, tracing the unfolding of the revolutionary movement in Guangzhou is crucial to understanding the uprising. But this is only one narrative. The Uprising was also part of a national narrative, primarily a military against a social narrative, that rendered the uprising into the last of the three uprisings in 1927, beginning in central China and ending in Guangzhou. Finally, the Uprising was part of a global narrative, that began in Paris in 1871, moved through St. Petersburg and Moscow in 1917, and ended in Guangzhou in 1927. Those involved in the Uprising (the workers, women and intellectuals in Guangzhou; the representatives of the Communist Party center in Shanghai; and Comintern representatives in Shanghai and Guangzhou) located the Uprising in their different narratives. What is of immediate interest for purposes of this study is how those placed in Guangzhou, whatever their affinities, constructed a narrative out of these different narratives that was at once local, national, and global; that brought together different spatialities and temporalities in the concrete circumstances of Guangzhou.
Class
The second aspect pertains to the narratives (or discourses of revolution) constructed by its different constituencies; most importantly, intellectuals, workers, and women. I have already examined the different meanings of revolution to workers in Guangzhou versus the Communist Party representatives ('Narrativizing Revolution: The Guangzhou Uprising [11-13 December 1927] in Workers' Perspective,' Modern China, Vol.23 No.4, October 1997:363-397). The same intellectual and emotional complexities that prevailed among workers are to be found among intellectuals and women who discovered different meanings in the revolution, anticipated different consequences from their participation in it, and were deeply divided over the problem of revolution. These different readings of revolution are too complex to go into here. Suffice it to say that in this regard, too, alternative readings of revolution clashed with one another, but could also achieve some coherence through participation in the revolutionary movement. To cite the example of workers, there has been a tendency in recent scholarship to dismiss the importance of 'class' because of the incoherence of workers' consciousness. In Guangzhou, too, workers clashed with one another; and some of the worst atrocities were committed by workers against one another. On the other hand, we need to remember that 'class' is not just a positive concept (a reflection of reality), or even just an analytical one, but also a reference for self-identification. what may be most remarkable is not that workers were divided (by place origin, different political affiliations, different interests), but the extent to which they could overcome such divisions by a new consciousness of class. Once the concept of class entered the language of self-identification, class itself provided the discursive terrain for the expression of differences (in other words, which workers best represented 'class' interests). The same may be said of the question of gender, which entered revolutionary discourse during these same years, and the self-identification of intellectuals who participated in the revolutionary movement. Needless to say, these self-identifications also need to be grasped in place-based ways. The uncovering of these different narrativizations is important for challenging teleological narratives of revolution. Indeed, recognition of alternative narratives is crucial to understanding that the teleology could be sustained only by suppressing other, also revolutionary, narratives. What this implies is that in China, as in most other revolutionary situations, there was not just one revolution but many revolutions, which were appropriated for the revolution. At the same time, it is equally important to recognize that revolution itself was a transformative process, that brought together different narratives, in the process reshaping their relationship to one another, as well as to the master narrative of revolution.
Arif Dirlik is attached to Duke University. Currently he is a fellow at The Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS), e-mail: dirlik@nias.knaw.nl.