Nationalism and Communism: Foes or Friends? Comparing the Bolshevik and Chinese Revolutionaries

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  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 6. Populism and Revolution

Abstract

Sociologists have noticed that nationalist movement has varied inclusiveness to leftist ideology, sometimes incorporating the latter as a reinforcing friend while sometimes provoking it to be a negating foe. This article, by comparing the Bolshevik and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) revolutionaries, explains this variation. It argues that whether communist ideology was included as a supportive instrument or excluded to become an anti-/trans-national frame depends on the social strength of nationalism in a society. Probing the two leaderships’ as well as their competing political groups’ infusions into nationalism, this article conceptualizes “strength” as three dimensions: (a) there is a diffused national culture that socializes the potential radical elites into their nation; (b) the nationalist movement is institutionally open to broad social strata and allows the lower class to participate in; (c) the anti-colonial revolution is widely viewed as geopolitically feasible and the engagement is thus thought of as necessary for legitimacy. Along this framework, this article argues that nationalism was much powerful in post-imperial China, where it successfully caged the communists, than in Tsarist Russia, where the weak nationalism(s) left a large radical group precluded or blocked outside to become anti-nationalist communists. Such a thesis also suggests that it is the “social strength” rather than “intellectual emptiness” that shapes the inclusiveness of nationalism. This article compiles a comparative biographical data that aggregates nationalist and non-nationalist elites across two societies to compare how individuals were/were not captured by nationalism. Most materials are drawn from original Russian and Chinese primary sources.

Author

• Luyang Zhou, Brown University