Encyclopedia of India–China Cultural Contacts v2.c14.s4.t33: M N Roy
Encyclopedia of India–China Cultural Contacts v2.c14.s4.t33
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M N Roy
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M N Roy (March 21, 1887 – January 26, 1954) was a radical Indian political activist who was for a while in the 1920s a prominent figure in the Comintern. He became well known for his active intervention in the debate on Lenin's *Draft Theses on the National and Colonial Question at the Second Congress of the Communist International* held in Moscow in 1920. In his capacity as a representative of the Comintern, he was sent to China in 1927 to deal with problems that had appeared in the united front between the Guomindang and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the course of the Northern Expedition jointly
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M N Roy
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launched by the two parties for national unification. He was in China from February to July 1927, during which the rift between the two parties came out in the open following Chiang Kai-shek's coup against the Communists in April.
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According to M N Roy himself, he had been closely connected with the political situation in China since 1922. He claimed to have contributed towards the evolution of the policy of a united front between the GMD and CCP, but said that this policy later "degenerated into opportunist deviations". In November-December 1926, the Seventh Extraordinary Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Comintern met in Moscow to discuss the conditions in China, and adopted its theses on the Chinese situation which Roy apparently helped in drafting. This document stressed the need to develop the agrarian revolution and not just rely on an alliance with bourgeois forces represented by the Guomindang. Roy reached Canton in February, and in the ensuing weeks he tried to convince those with whom he interacted about the need to adopt the line proposed in the Theses of the Comintern. He travelled to Wuhan, where he attended the Fifth Congress of the CCP, held between April 27 and May 9. This Congress, held in the immediate aftermath of
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*M N Roy’s Memoirs*
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Chiang Kai-shek’s offensive against the Communists, formally adopted the Comintern’s theses, but was not able to steer the party away from catastrophe. As the anti-communist offensive in China unfolded, Roy and other Comintern representatives were recalled in July 1927, and Roy in particular came in for criticism for his role in the debacle. He was expelled from the Comintern in December 1929, and later on, abandoned his Marxist views to become an advocate of Radical Humanism. The best-known of his works concerning the situation in China and his views about it is ‘*Revolution and Counter-Revolution in China*’.
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(*Madhavi Thampi*)