This article is basically about some random Chinese Trot with a heavily distorted retelling of 20th century Chinese history. Like most anti-Stalin critiques, it weaponizes Stalin's mistake in telling the CPC to self-liquidate and join the KMT as well as Trotsky's correct conclusion that the KMT would betray the CPC to push some bullshit "Stalin bad Trotsky good" talking point. It brushes over the reason why Stalin would have the idea in the first. The KMT wasn't founded by Chiang Kai-Shek, but by Sun Yat-sen, a genuine progressive who represented the progressive role that national liberation struggle has. After Sun Yat-sen died, there was a power struggle between the left and right wing of the KMT with the right wing under Chiang Kai-Shek winning. Chiang betraying the Communist at Shanghai was the first act towards purging the left wing. The CPC weren't stupid to stick to Chiang after he purged the left wing of the KMT. Their betrayal was part of that purging in the first place.

So much garbage from this article. Here's some random snippets:

By then, Wang himself was living in Britain, having been assisted in the move by the historian Gregor Benton. Benton has played an important role in keeping alive both Wang’s memory and that of Chinese Trotskyism in general.

Pretty pathetic how a particular Chinese tendency hinged on the generosity of some random white dude. Who can a bunch of self-exiles holed up in a country that still had a Chinese colony until 1997 possibly understand what the Chinese masses actually want?

Benton previously translated Memoirs of a Chinese Revolutionary into English, and he was also responsible for this edition of Mao Zedong Thought, which shortens the original Chinese text by about one-third. Wang himself died in 2002, at the age of ninety-five, and Benton expresses the hope that he “would have accepted my excisions in the spirit in which I made them — to preserve the integrity of his thoughts while spreading them to a new generation of readers.”

So this random Anglo proceeded to edit this random Trot's memoirs by cutting out a third of the text. And we're somehow supposed to believe the received English text is meaningful.

Mao and Wang were at one time both revolutionaries in the same movement, yet one died as a world-famous nation builder while the other ended his days as a virtual unknown in exile. As Wang recalled, the two men were never close comrades, but their friendship circles overlapped:

So this dude basically didn't know Mao nor was he part of Mao's inner circle. In conclusion, some dude who didn't personally know Mao wrote a memoir psychoanalyzing Mao and retelling early 20th century Chinese history who then had his memoir further bowdlerized by some white dude who probably never even set foot in China. I'm sure this text has important things to say about Mao and not be completely useless, if not misleading.

If he had known about the relationship in Marxist doctrine between workers and peasants, town and village, the former leading the latter, he would have slipped back into Shanghai or gone into hibernation in Wuhan rather than climb Jinggang Mountains.

Mao wouldn't have because Mao wasn't some dumbass dogmatist who insisted that material reality conformed to his preconceived notions. Wow, we almost got liquidated in Shanghai, yeah let's continue to stick around in that city, I'm sorry nothing bad would possibly happen. He correctly analyzed the situation and behaved accordingly.

Mao’s reaction to the failed insurrection — which later became known as the Autumn Harvest Uprising — seems to have drawn upon his literary knowledge. He took just two books, both of which were Chinese classics, to the mountains with him. One was Water Margin (水滸傳) — also known as Outlaws of the Marsh — the tale of a band of 105 men and three women who overthrew a corrupt dynasty from their mountainous hideout during the twelfth century.

Marx was a brilliant theorist, but he unfortunately didn't write much about waging guerilla warfare. Mao had to make due with what he had.

backward villages for the modern littoral, peasants for workers, a small number of communists in command of peasant armies for the industrial proletariat’s influence over the peasantry, and armed secession and protracted war for propaganda, agitation, long-term organization, and revolution by means of a general strike.

A general strike isn't going to do shit when China was ruled by warlords and imperialists. This is about as meaningful as voting the warlords and imperialists out of office. The only way to subdue the warlords and expel the imperialists out of China is through an army, a red army, a people's liberation army.

As Wang notes, Mao’s famous remark that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun” encapsulates this mindset.

China was ruled by warlords at that time. I wonder how Mao came up with that idea.

The second Chinese revolution, which triumphed in the late 1940s, was largely a military takeover with the urban masses playing the role of spectators.

The vast majority of Chinese people in 1949 were peasants. There weren't "urban masses" because China was a semi-feudal semi-colonized country.

Wang Fanxi saw Mao as an opportunist who fitted theory to practice and strategy to tactics rather than the other way round.

This just means Mao wasn't some dogmatist who thought practice comes from theory instead of the other way around. This is supposed to be a good thing. Telling on yourself as some dogmatist who don't know when or how to adjust your praxis.

As Wang observed, Mao blended Marxist and Confucian terminology, referring to the final stage of his Chinese revolution as datong (大同: “Great Harmony”), a concept drawn directly from The Book of Rites (禮記) by Confucius

Reappropriating datong from Confucianism didn't start with Mao. It was done by an entire generation of Chinese socialists before Mao, including Sun Yat-sen. And another point, schools of philosophy reappropriating terms used by rival schools of philosophy is what Chinese philosophy has always done. Daoists reappropriated wuwei from Confucians to mean something completely different to the point where wuwei is more associated with Daoism than Confucianism. I guess Mao had to jettison over 2 millennia of Chinese philosophy to dogmatically follow the writings of a couple of dead German dudes who never set foot in China. And finally, as a nitpick, I don't think Confucius actually wrote The Book of Rites. The traditional narrative is that Confucius edited the text and the other Five Classics. It's just a way for the article to shoehorn some bullshit Orientalism by namedropping Confucius.

According to Wang Fanxi, Chinese Trotskyists were “shaken to the core” by the events of 1949 as they did not expect the CPC to emerge victorious. He concluded at the time that the Chinese revolution was the victory of “a collectivist bureaucratic party and in no way the victory of a Chinese proletarian party, that is, of proletarian revolution.”

This is pure cope lmao. And also telling on themselves for tacitly rooting for the KMT to triumph over the CPC.

Garbage article. I'm sorry this is a mess of a post.