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Michael
Shapiro in China
Michael Shapiro went to China shortly after the foundation of the People's Republic. He married there and worked there, mainly as an advisor on the English translations of Mao's works and as a correspondent for the British Communist Party's (CPGB's) Daily Worker. Unable to return to Britain as a result of his activities during the Korean War, he died in China in 1986. Though the speaker at his memorial meeting in Peking claimed that he had for decades dedicated himself to the "cause of the British [Communist] Party," [1] Shapiro in fact fell out with the British party after taking the Chinese side in the bitter polemics which erupted between it and the Soviet party in the 1960s. His letters from China provide a fascinating insight into this and other matters.
Shapiro went to China with Allan Winnington, well known for his reporting from the Chinese and Korean lines during the Korean War. In his Breakfast with Mao, Winnington provides a fascinating account of their clandestine journey to China via the Trans-Siberian railway. Their arrival and appointments as press advisors to the China Information Bureau were announced by Radio Peking [2]. Given that Winnington had been sent to work in China by the CPGB [3], it seems very likely that Shapiro too had been.
Shapiro had been a prominent member of the London District of the CPGB. In the 1930s he lectured on housing and allied matters at one of the colleges of London University. Working closely with Phil Piratin, later to become one of the two Communist MPs elected in the general election of 1945, he then put his professional knowledge to good use as the Secretary of the Stepney Tenants Defence League. After the war Shapiro was one of twelve Communist councillors in Stepney. Piratin wrote warmly of him in his Our Flag Stays Red [4].
Like Winnington, Shapiro was a war correspondent for the Daily Worker during the Korean war. Though undoubtedly noted by the British security forces, this alone would probably not have led to serious consequences. However, they and other British communists had some involvement with British prisoners of war. The British Ministry of Defence (MoD) alleged that they had been complicit in ill-treatment and torture of the prisoners and that Shapiro had threatened to have one prisoner shot. These allegations first surfaced in 1955 in a MoD 'Blue Book', Treatment of British Prisoners of War in Korea, and led to demands in Parliament that they be hanged if they returned to Britain [5].
The British party claimed that Shapiro and Winnington had merely given talks to prisoners and facilitated correspondence home and stoutly denied the MoD's charges, publishing rebuttals by Winnington and by ex-prisoners. Shapiro dismissed the allegations as "rubbish", whilst Neal Ascherson has pointed out that "nobody has ever come forward to substantiate [the charges] and many have stoutly denied it." [6] It is noteworthy in this respect that MoD reports on the debriefing of prisoners of war make no mention of Winnington or Shapiro, referring only to the activities of "English speaking Chinese". Their names surfaced only a year or so later, when publication of the 'Blue Book' was first mooted. This project was a response to government anxieties about the effectiveness on returned prisoners of communist "indoctrination". We will probably never know the truth of the matter. But Ascherson's point, an opinion from the government's law officers pointing out that there was no hard evidence that Winnington and Shapiro had been involved in the ill-treatment of prisoners and a letter to the MoD from Winston Churchill's private secretary, indicating that Churchill believed "the sooner the booklet is published the better", all suggest that the allegations are best treated as black propaganda [7].
Willie Gallacher, the old Clydesider and founder member of the CP, corresponded with Shapiro and other British communists in China for a number of years. The correspondents included Dave Springhall, expelled from the British Party in 1943 for spying for the Soviet Union. Whatever had happened in 1943 [8], he was clearly at least a de facto member by 1950. A letter from Springhall and others in 1950 spoke effusively of the Chinese Party :
More than anything else, we are learning from the remarkably developed style of work of the Chinese comrades…We feel in many ways as though we were back in the infant stage re-learning our lessons and there is so much to learn and one is never too old to begin again. [9]
But within a few years the British colony was to be divided by polemics between the Chinese and Soviet parties (CPC & CPSU). Shapiro became an ardent supporter of the Chinese in their struggle against Soviet 'revisionism', whilst Winnington, already sharply critical of the Chinese road to socialism after the upheavals of the Great Leap Forward of the late fifties, took the Soviet side [10]. Personal relations clearly became strained and perceptions coloured by the increasingly bitter divisions between the two parties. Shapiro is conspicuous by his absence from Breakfast with Mao, but Winnington's gratuitous sneer that one of the "foreign friends who flocked to China…an East Londoner, was called 'holier than Mao' by a woman veteran of the International Brigade" [11] surely refers to him. One wonders also how objective was Shapiro's caustic assessment of Phil Piratin — "arrogant and autocratic, with little or no theory and principles, but plenty of bossy determination to be obeyed." [12]
Inevitably, Shapiro's once warm relations with the party at home in Britain were also affected, given that the great majority of British communists supported the CPSU (it is noteworthy though that Shapiro claimed that during his visit to China in 1960 Harry Pollitt endorsed the Chinese Party's views [13]). An initially comradely and frank correspondence between Gallacher and Shapiro on these matters descended into abuse. In their last exchange (only part of which survives), they discussed the Chinese view that imperialism was a 'paper tiger'. Shapiro compared this concept with Lenin's notion that imperialism was a "colossus with feet of clay". Gallacher, drawing on his non-conformist roots, referred Shapiro to the bible: "I should mention that Moses tactically took his enemies seriously, and made his plans accordingly." [14] A short time later a further letter from Gallacher caused Shapiro to rebuke him — "your words are intended to wound, almost like a physical blow… It won't go, Willie, working yourself up into a rage is no answer to the hard facts I put to you and the points I made." — and to urge him to search his conscience. Gallacher's reply was terse in the extreme:
Some time back, in the course of a discussion on Communism and religion… a Catholic gent expressed concern about my soul. I told him he had no need to worry, "my soul", I said, is in good hands — MY OWN. And that, Mr. Shapiro, goes for my conscience. P.S. How about your own? Are you still palming yourself off as a member of the Party here in Britain? [15].
There seem to have no further exchanges. But Shapiro continued to correspond with two communist friends in London and with their son. This correspondence began not long after the dispute between the Soviet and Chinese communist parties had become public knowledge. Like the principal protagonists, Shapiro was initially reticent in his views. But his statement that "the Chinese party is not well understood in Britain... I'll only say that China refuses to allow itself to be blackmailed by the US threat to use nuclear weapons", clearly alludes to the Chinese view that the Soviet Union was capitulating to this threat. Later, his criticisms of the Soviet party became explicit. In 1964 Shapiro was adamant that Khruschev had done "a lot of wrecking in the communist movement as he moved away from the teachings of Marx and Lenin. He has done a lot of damage to the Soviet Union by opening the door to capitalist trends and movements there." By 1975 Shapiro, like the Chinese communists, believed that the Soviet Union had "taken the road back to capitalism and imperialism." [16]
It would be easy to conclude that Shapiro simply knew on which side his bread was buttered. But quite a number of British communists were attracted ideologically and politically to the Chinese side of the dispute. Shapiro had joined the CPGB in 1934, before the Popular Front had set in train the reformist process which led to the adoption of the British Road to Socialism in 1951. Though there is no evidence that Shapiro was one of them, quite a few British communists were critical of the war-time and post-war politics of the British party [17] and sympathised with the Australian party's fierce polemics against these politics in 1948". [18] To Shapiro, the Chinese may well have seemed to be offering a return to a revolutionary purity which had been tainted by the experience of the Popular Front. Moreover, they had mounted a stout defence of Stalin, the lodestar for communists of Shapiro's generation. For him, Stalin had "carried forward the work of Lenin" despite "weaknesses" [19].
Shapiro eventually became convinced that the British party had become incorrigibly "revisionist". He was angered by the refusal of the editor of its journal Comment to print articles explaining the Chinese position. He attacked John Gollan, the Secretary of the CPGB, for "dishonesty" during a visit to China. In 1965 he claimed that the British party, by "soft-peddling" in its attitude to the United States and its hostility to the Chinese party, had "sold out" [20].
Though Shapiro made little attempt to woo his principal corespondents, TK and LK, away from the British party, he was clearly heartened by the refusal of their son, MK, to follow his parents into the Party. MK was repelled by the dogmatism typical of communists of his parent's generation and was sceptical of marxism. Shapiro made great efforts to win him for the cause. To some, Shapiro's insistence that marxism "is a science" will be evidence that he too was a dogmatist. But Shapiro's marxism was remote from that of those who looked first to the texts. He was adamant that "Marxism is not a religion" [21] and, in correspondence on such matters as Nixon's visit to China, favoured analysis and argument, rarely quoting Marx or Lenin. Like many of his generation, MK found the CPGB thoroughly reformist and was attracted to the extreme left groups that proliferated in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s. But much to Shapiro's dismay, he joined (briefly) the quasi-Trotskyist Internationalist Socialists (IS), the forerunner of today's Socialist Workers' Party, rather than one of the small maoist groups.
Of these groups, Shapiro rated the Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist) (CPB[ML]) highly. This organisation had been founded by Reg Birch, an erstwhile comrade from the London District Committee of the CPGB and in the 1970s a member of the National Executive of the Amalgamated Engineering Union. Perhaps the organisation's gross overestimation of the prospects for revolution in Britain — during the February 1974 general election the party's paper, The Worker, urged its readers not to vote but to "prepare for revolution" — appealed to his eternally optimistic spirit. Shapiro, unsurprisingly, seems to have been completely unaware of how hard was the going for the maoist groups of the sixties and seventies. At a time when there were perhaps 600-700 maoists in the whole of Britain, Shapiro was convinced that "there must be one or two such groups by now in E[ast] or S[outh]E[east] London, or it shouldn't be difficult to form one." [22]
One wonders also how accurate his accounts of life in China were. Shapiro was highly impressed by Chinese socialism. His chronicles are notable (and an interesting contrast with most traveller's tales from Stalin's Soviet Union) in that what impressed him was not so much China's economic achievements, remarkable as he found these, as transformations in relations between people: "I wish you could see how people discuss problems and work out solutions here — quietly, sensibly, without fuss — everyone drawn in to give their opinions and all opinions respected and thought over". The author can vouch for these claims from personal experience, but Shapiro painted a picture of a workers' and peasants' nirvana. There is no reason no believe that he was untruthful, but Shapiro did tend to toe the party line. China's grave economic difficulties of 1960 were attributed entirely to "drought" and withdrawal of "Soviet experts", with no mention whatsoever of the problems wrought by the Great Leap Forward. The letter offering this analysis was written in 1963, when food was still rationed in many parts of China, yet Shapiro wrote of "wads of good, cheap food on the market." It is perhaps relevant to note that he led, by Chinese standards, a privileged life. In the early 1960s he lived in a "lovely one storey bungalow, with its own garden" and paid "no rent or electricity or rates, as all this is reckoned as part of the pay for work. In addition, the place is kept clean. So that both my wife and I can concentrate on our work without many household worries." [23]
Shapiro was imprisoned for a while during the Cultural Revolution, but this does not appear to have shaken his basic convictions. In the mid-seventies he wrote glowingly of the effects of the Cultural Revolution. His last letter, which seems to have been written shortly after their arrest, claims that the Gang of Four "did a lot of damage which is being rapidly put right." [24] What Shapiro made of the new course adopted by the Chinese Communist Party after Mao's death, we don't know, for there were to be no more letters. Perhaps this was due to the stroke he had suffered a few years before the last letter. But perhaps not. According to the speaker at his memorial meeting he continued after his stroke to "read carefully the English version of Xinhua's daily news bulletin and to put forward written suggestions for improvement." [25] Given Shapiro's views, it is quite likely that his silence can be attributed to disapproval of the CPC's post-Mao policies.
His last letters make it clear that Shapiro would have liked to have returned to Britain for a visit. That he was unable to do so was the price he paid for his activities as a professional revolutionary. He applied for a passport in the 1950s. He was advised that he could not renew his passport but could be provided with documents to return to Britain, where he would be liable to prosecution for his activities in Korea [26]. Shapiro turned down this enticing offer and continued his revolutionary activities. He had a full and rewarding life. He was one of those rare beings whose revolutionary fire does not dim with age. For this, he deserves our respect.
Neil Redfern, Manchester Metropolitan University
