They have “autonomous regions”, but not republics. China is not a federation. Rather, it’s a Unitary state.
But USSR was a Federal state, a union of multiple Soviet republics, and one of the republics (RSFSR) was also a federal republic. Each republic had its own flag, state emblem, anthem and communist party (except RSFSR, which didn’t have its own anthem and party). They did it all according to Lenin’s formula of “The Right of Nations to Self-Determination Up To And Including Secession”. It was the only country in the world to include that in their constitution.
But China doesn’t have all that. Why?
P.S. I’m looking for answers, not confrontation.
China is actually highly decentralized, with individual provinces and localities having a great deal of autonomy in terms of setting economic policy.
They did it all according to Lenin’s formula of “The Right of Nations to Self-Determination Up To And Including Secession”. It was the only country in the world to include that in their constitution.
This isn’t an answer to your question, but with hindsight, we can very clearly see that Lenin was disastrously wrong to structure the Soviet Union in this way. Making a union of formally-independent that was only held together by the political power of the CPSU was a deep weakness at the heart of the project that directly led to the Soviet Union’s breakup. He should have followed Stalin’s recommendation and just had the RSFSR annex the other republics.
do you have a source for that stalin recommendation? would be interested in learning more
Here you go, straight from Great Soviet Encyclopedia:
Autonomization
a term which arose in connection with the work of a commission created by a decision of the Central Committee of the RCP (Bolshevik) in August 1922 to work out a proposal for uniting the independent Soviet republics—including the RSFSR, Ukrainian SSR, Trans-caucasian SFSR, and Byelorussian SSR—into a single state. J. V. Stalin (chairman, People’s Commissariat of Nationalities), G. I. Petrovskii, A. F. Miasnikov, S. M. Kirov, G. K. Ordzhonikidze, V. M. Molotov, A. G. Cher-viakov, and others took part in the commission’s work. The plan for autonomization, which was presented by Stalin and accepted by the commission, proposed that the RSFSR be declared a state which would include the Ukrainian SSR, Transcaucasian SFSR, and Byelorussian SSR with the rights of autonomous republics. Accordingly, the organs of supreme power and administration would be the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, the Council of People’s Commissars, and the Council of Labor and Defense of the RSFSR.
The interrelations which had formed by that time among the independent republics were established on the basis of equitable treaties concerning military, political, and economic alliances. The tasks of strengthening defense, restoring and further developing the national economy on the path to socialism, and promoting the political, economic, and cultural development of all nationalities required closer unity among Soviet republics in a single multinational state. The principal problem of the Communist Party Central Committee commission concerned the political form of the multinational Soviet socialist state. Plan A was discussed by the plenums of the central committees of each of the republic communist parties and was not supported by a majority of them. Nevertheless, the commissions, at the meetings of Sept. 23 and 24, 1922, approved Stalin’s theses on the autonomization plan. This decision was a mistake. The theses of the plan took into account the need for strict unity and centralization of the efforts of the Soviet republics; but in so doing, it violated the sovereign rights of the republics. It was, in essence, a step backward in comparison with the forms of national-state construction already in existence.
V. I. Lenin, who at that time was ill, acquainted himself with the materials of the commission and discussed them with a number of comrades. On Sept. 26, 1922, he sent a letter to members of the Politburo of the Central Committee in which he presented a fundamental critique of the plan and proposed and supported the idea of forming a united state based on full equality of all independent Soviet republics. He wrote: “We recognize ourselves as having equal rights with the Ukrainian SSR and other republics, and together, on an equal basis, we will enter into a new union, a new federation” (Poln. sobr. soch., 5th ed., vol. 45, p. 211). Lenin stressed that the independence of the republics must not be impaired, but “a new stage, a federation of equal republics” must be created (ibid., p. 212). On Oct. 6, 1922, Lenin sent a memo to the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Party in which he categorically insisted on the equal representation of all union republics in the leadership of the all-federal Central Executive Committee (see ibid., p. 214). On the basis of Lenin’s plan for the creation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the commission prepared a draft that was reported by Stalin to the Plenum of the Central Committee of the RCP (Bolshevik) and approved by it on Oct. 6, 1922.
Lenin returned to his critique of the autonomization plan in one of his last letters, “On the Question of Nationalities, or On ‘Autonomization.’ “ Lenin wrote that “this entire venture of ‘autonomization’ was fundamentally wrong and untimely” (ibid., p. 356) and that it could bring only harm, distorting the ideas of unification of Soviet republics in the spirit of great power chauvinism. The draft violated the principle of the self-determination of nations, giving the independent republics only a right of autonomous existence within the RSFSR. Lenin spoke against excessive centralization in matters of unification and demanded maximum at-tentiveness and caution in resolving matters of national policy.
Unification of republics should be carried out in a way that would truly guarantee equal rights for nations and strengthen the sovereignty of each union republic. “It is necessary to preserve and strengthen the union of socialist republics,” wrote Lenin. “About this measure there can be no doubt. We need it, as does the world Communist proletariat, for the struggle with the world bourgeoisie and for defense against its intrigues” (ibid., p. 360). Lenin’s letter was made public at a meeting of leaders of delegations of the Twelfth Congress of the RCP (Bolshevik) in April 1923, and his directions became the basis for the resolution of the congress, “On the Nationality Question.”
The creation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, completed by the first All-Union Congress of Soviets on Dec. 30, 1922, was a triumph of Lenin’s ideas of proletarian internationalism, fraternal friendship, and unity of equal and sovereign people.
REFERENCES
Lenin, V. I. “On the Establishment of the U.S.S.R." Lenin, V. I. “The Question of Nationalities or “Autonomisation””
I’m somewhat confused on yours and Lenin’s points, then. It sounds like he’s advocating for more centralization, as in the Russian Soviet be the only one, yet he also says that too much centralization is a mistake, and that the republics existing or having too much independence led to it’s downfall.
I thought the original intention behind the USSR being made up of different republics, was to lessen the chance/danger of rebellions/coups, and that each republic could be tailored to the polity’s population.
Thank you for your reply.
This is the first time I’ve heard someone pin the USSR’s demise on federalism. How exactly do you figure this played a role in the downfall of the Soviet Union?
You should read Vladislav Zubok’s Collapse. The formal structure of the USSR meant that it was held together by the strength of the CPSU. When the party’s power faltered due to Gorbachev, ambitious politicians took over the SSRs and pushed for greater and greater autonomy in order to maximize their power until they broke the whole thing apart.
Why overcomplicate things? Can you imagine having to comply to different laws and regulations in different provinces? Add to that, now you have to deal with state level politics as well as federal politics. Imagine the nightmare!
China is a 5000+ years old civilization, and it is no coincidence that every dynasty tends towards centralization. Central brain is simply better.
Most of China have been part of China for centuries while a lot of the non-Russian parts of the Soviet Union came from much more recent conquests. To give two examples:
Tibet has been continuously part of China since the Qing dynasty around the 17th century on top of being formally part of China during the Yuan dynasty.
Kazakhstan existed as an independent polity called the Kazakh Khanate, which was a successor state of the Golden Horde, until it was annexed by the Russian empire by the mid 19th century.
Tibet has been continuously part of China for three centuries before the overthrown of Qing while the entirety of Kazakhstan was only part of the Russian empire for several decades before the Romanovs were overthrown. You really can’t claim Kazakhstan is Russian in the same way you can claim Tibet is Chinese.
There’s also the fact that the Qing dynasty worked hard to decouple Chinese civilization from Han since the emperors had to juggle their legitimacy of being the rightful heirs of Chinese civilization with being Manchu (various conquest dynasties like Northern Wei and Yuan also did this), so saying Tibet is Chinese doesn’t carry some weird ethnonationalist or chauvinist connotation but merely a statement of fact that Tibet has been part of various Chinese polities and contributed to Chinese culture like every other Chinese ethnic group. The Han do not have a monopoly on Chinese culture. Tibet is Chinese because Tibetans are Chinese.
The Soviet Union (and Yugoslavia) tried to create a Soviet (and Yugoslavian) identity that encapsulated all of the various ethnicities under one Soviet/Yugoslavian umbrella, but they didn’t have the benefit of 3+ centuries like the Chinese had. Mix in some borrowing of European understanding of nationalism and you get people who think that each major ethnicity having their own nation-state for the sake of combating Great Russian chauvinism united under a federation was a good idea. But a federation is inherently less stable than a unitary state.
Counter point : Tibet was also it’s own empire long ago, it also was unstable during most of the Quin rule, kept it’s own political class since it’s medieval times, rebelled against and expeled ethnical chinese several times in its existence and was mostly a tributary of the several political entities that are seen as the precursor of modern China.
Llhasa was always it’s own thing under the mongolian rule, the quin dynasty rule, the gelug rule, ect… With their own tribal leaders, sub religions (from bon to all the flavors of buddist they had) perpetuating their own peculiar brand of rule on their people.
Three centuries are nothing compared to the thousand year history they had before the quin, and claiming that Tibet is chinese at the very least, a very large simplification, if not an outright attempt at disinformation.
Tibet is culturally, religiously, legally (in the sense that they had their own code of law) distinct from China and has been for next to always.
What you are claiming is akin to saying that Quebec in Canada always was Canadian because their indigenous tribes contiously were conquered by the English and French colonist in the 15-16-17 centuries…
Counter point : Tibet was also it’s own empire long ago, it also was unstable during most of the Quin rule, kept it’s own political class since it’s medieval times, rebelled against and expeled ethnical chinese several times in its existence and was mostly a tributary of the several political entities that are seen as the precursor of modern China.
It stopped being a truly independent empire after Tang. Post Tang, it hovered between being a tributary state and being formally part of China.
Llhasa was always it’s own thing under the mongolian rule, the quin dynasty rule, the gelug rule, ect… With their own tribal leaders, sub religions (from bon to all the flavors of buddist they had) perpetuating their own peculiar brand of rule on their people.
Yuan also had a special imperial office for the head Tibetan Buddhist. This office was also the titular head of all things Buddhist within China, not just Tibetan Buddhism. So this imperial office, which had to be staffed by a member of the Tibetan clergy, was the final say with regards to Buddhism regardless of whether you were a Tibetan who practiced Tibetan Buddhism in Tibet or a Han who practiced other schools of Buddhism in other provinces. If people outside of Tibet had to subscribe to Tibetan religious customs, then you can no longer claim separation between Tibet and the rest of China.
What you are claiming is akin to saying that Quebec in Canada always was Canadian because their indigenous tribes contiously were conquered by the English and French colonist in the 15-16-17 centuries…
Now that’s just silly. Tibet’s incorporation in Yuan was completely peaceful, mostly because the Mongols didn’t want to wage war and the Tibetans didn’t want to be waged war at. Tibet’s incorporation in Qing was a struggle between the Dzungar Khanate, a Mongolic polity. and Qing, a Chinese polity, over Tibet. While Qing would go on to ethnically cleanse the Dzungars, Tibetans were left alone.
The full comprehensive answer you’re looking for is Hao Shiyuan’s books “How the Communist Party of China Manages the Issue of Nationality” and “China’s Solution to its Ethno-National Issues.”
In short, the original structural intent of the CPC for China was precisely that of a federal state based on the models of the USSR and the United States which had also influenced Sun Yat-sen’s “Republic of the Five Nationalites.” The contradiction was that China was a country that had always invited fantasies of partition. Churchill in 1901 during the Boxer Rebellion infamously said his “Aryan triumph” quote in the context of his own imagining of China’s partition: “I think we shall have to take the Chinese in hand and regulate them. I believe in the ultimate partition of China. The Aryan stock is bound to triumph.” That view for a federal system therefore evolved in the process of the historical and material conditions of the CPC’s experience within the disunited China of the Warlord, WW2 and Civil War eras, which saw the British attempts to legitimate the feudal Lamaist theocracy’s secession in Tibet, the Japanese attempts to carve away the Northeast as Manchukuo, the breakaway of Outer Mongolia, the incitement of the two Turkestan secessionist attempts propped by the Soviets in Xinjiang and the various warlord clique territories.
As such, one of the defining qualities of the Chinese polity as recognized by the CPC was its historical tradition of unity. This had largely preserved the territorial integrity, which is the sine qua non for all states, of the various Chinese governments throughout the torturous first half of the 20th century. In the materialist view that socialist governance must reflect the history and national conditions of the given state, this historical context was therefore instrumental in influencing the CPC’s decision against a federal system, as Hao explains in this excerpt and cites Zhou Enlai’s views on the matter in 1949:
Both the Chinese Soviet Republic founded by the Communist Party of China in 1931 and the Red Army’s political declaration of establishing a federal republic in China en route to the Long March can be identified as the Chinese Communists’ early attempts to inaugurate a federal republic in China. However, these symbolic advocacies and practices were unable to be realized due to their incompatibility with the national conditions of China.
Historical facts have testified that neither the American-style “one out of many” federalism nor the Soviet-style “union of constituent socialist republics” applies to China due to its unique ancient historical process and modern historical experience. Therefore, maintaining state unity and respect for diversity have been upheld as a national commitment by the people of all ethnic groups due to China’s time-honored history as a unified multi-ethnic state. Toward the modern era of China, which was heralded by the First Opium War in 1840, the state unity, political unification, ethnic solidarity, and territorial integrity of the country were seriously threatened and undermined by the foreign powers’ aggression. Neither the social conditions for Bourgeois Revolution nor the backbone forces for launching Proletarian Revolution were existent in Mongolia, Tibet or Xinjiang at that time. If these regions were factitiously facilitated for “national self-determination” and founding independent states, they would inevitably be reduced as imperialist powers’ colonies or spheres of influence. In addition, the Versailles Peace Conference in the wake of the First World War permitted no space for China’s national self-determination. Therefore, federalism is only a fantasy for China; it would only lead to national and state disintegration.
The federalism form of government tallies with the reality of the Russian Revolution at that time; however, it does not mean that the Soviet-style union of constituent republics is the only form of government for all the socialist states. Some federated states of Eastern Europe founded after the Second World War, for example, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, successively collapsed after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. It was, fundamentally speaking, the inevitable result of divorcing from their corresponding national conditions.
In addressing the first session of the CPPCC, Premier Zhou Enlai stated: “China is a multi-ethnic country in which the ethnic minorities make up less than 10% of the total population. Of course, all the ethnic groups, regardless of their population sizes and levels of economic development are on an equal footing. The Han people should respect the religious beliefs, languages, folkways, and customs of ethnic minorities. We advocate regional ethnic autonomy under the pre-condition of maintaining the territorial integrity of the country. Any ethnic group is undoubtedly entitled to the endowed right of self-determination. But today, the imperialists intend to divide China by fomenting the independence of Tibet, Taiwan or even Xinjiang. Against this backdrop, we hope people of all ethnic groups will not be incited by the provocations of the ill-conceived imperialist forces. For this very reason, the name of our new administration is called the People’s Republic of China, rather than the federal republic. We shall implement regional autonomy in the concentrated communities of ethnic minorities to ensure their right of autonomy”. Zhou Enlai added: “the policy of regional ethnic autonomy, by means of ethnic cooperation and assistance, aims to achieve a common development and prosperity of all ethnic groups. It will, in turn, contribute to a prosperous, culturally advanced and unified China”.
By comparing the historical conditions and developmental path of China with those of the Soviet Union, Zhou Enlai expounded the reasons why the Chinese government established the system of regional ethnic autonomy as a basic political system: “Historical conditions and the revolutionary movement development have provided a sound basis for ethnic cooperation in China; therefore, regional ethnic autonomy conforms to the national conditions of China”. Zhou Enlai added: “in addition to their obvious different appellations, the regional autonomy of China and the federalism of the Soviet Union are basically different; the former is an administrative division under unified state leadership, while the latter is a loosely-connected union of constituent republics, which are essentially ethnically-based proto-states.”
Approaching the matter from the standpoint of the proletariat and the proletarian revolution, Engels, like Marx, upheld democratic centralism, the republic–one and indivisible. He regarded the federal republic either as an exception and a hindrance to development, or as a transition from a monarchy to a centralized republic, as a “step forward” under certain special conditions. And among these special conditions, he puts the national question to the fore.
Although mercilessly criticizing the reactionary nature of small states, and the screening of this by the national question in certain concrete cases, Engels, like Marx, never betrayed the slightest desire to brush aside the national question
Engels proposes the following words for the self-government clause in the programme: “Complete selfgovernment for the provinces [gubernias or regions], districts and communes through officials elected by universal suffrage. The abolition of all local and provincial authorities appointed by the state.”
It is extremely important to note that Engels, armed with facts, disproved by a most precise example the prejudice which is very widespread, particularly among pettybourgeois democrats, that a federal republic necessarily means a greater amount of freedom than a centralized republic. This is wrong. It is disproved by the facts cited by Engels regarding the centralized French Republic of 792-98 and the federal Swiss Republic. The really democratic centralized republic gave more freedom that the federal republic. In other words, the greatest amount of local, regional, and other freedom known in history was accorded by a centralized and not a federal republic.
V. Lenin - State and Revolution
Are there independent nations with independent cultures that identify as a national body?
