Anti-imperialism in the Kuomintang Ideology and Propaganda in the 1920s

The aim of this study is to investigate the reflection of political problems regarding to the attitude towards imperialist powers and to establish the role and place of anti-imperialist rhetoric in Kuomintang propaganda at different stages of the political evolution of the party in the second half of the 1920s. To achieve this aim it was established which components of the Bolshevik anti-imperialist doctrine were adopted by the Kuomintang and changed during the adoption, and which initially were rejected. Also it was found out how the problems of the Kuomintang’s current policy, including their position on world powers, were reflected in public party materials at different periods of party evolution and established whether the tone of criticism differed at the head of the party and among the masses. The Kuomintang party leadership was able to imitate the ideological compromise and correction of its program installations with the Comintern, in fact leaving them unchanged, and the concessions were nominal. Moscow required for implementing the leading social and political role of the “labouring classes”, also the Kuomintang’s international orientation toward the USSR and the anti-imperialist orientation of party politics. The Manifesto of the 1st National Congress of Kuomintang only declared the need for "support" of peasants and workers, mainly in economic terms, party evaded the USSR politics orientation in this Manifesto, and only stated China's dependence on world imperialism. The major party transformation assumed the adoption of the Comintern interpretation of the concept of “imperialism” as the highest stage of the capitalist formation. Despite the fact that the party nominally adopted the Comintern anti-imperialist phraseology, for the Kuomintang the term “imperialism” remained as a characteristic of the principles of expansionist and colonialist policies, which can be defended by implementation of the building their own state policy based on Sun Yat-sen’s “three national principles”. Anti-imperialist struggle had a significant place in the Kuomintang press and the propaganda materials of the Huangpu military school in the first half of 1925, which were distributed among the troops and civilians. In those materials the Chinese militarists were servants of the imperialists, who were the main enemies of the Chinese people. At the end of May 1925, on the grounds of the National Revolution, the anti-imperialist spirits intensified. The phraseology and intensity of the anti-imperialist rhetoric weren’t changed even with the weakening of the influence of the Communists in the Kuomintang after the events of March 20, 1926. The split of the Kuomintang in April 1927, and a split in the Wuhan government with CPC and the USSR relations in the summer 1927, left anti-imperialist themes behind. The formal unification of the two Kuomintang wings in the summer of 1928 didn’t stop the power struggle between them, nor the civil war with the CCP. The difficult internal situation forced the Kuomintang groups to increase diplomatic relations with the powers and to reduce criticism of foreign imperialism, which was mainly in publications intended for party members, and spread to masses mainly in cases of military clashes with powers. The USSR had become the major representative of external expansion against China. Keywords: Kuomintang (Guomindang), Kuomintang propaganda, Anti-imperialism and the Kuomintang, USSR-Kuomintang relationships.