The Communist Party of Burma (CPB), also known as the Burma Communist Party (BCP), is an underground communist party in Myanmar (formerly Burma). The party adheres to Marxism–Leninism and Maoism (officially Mao Zedong Thought). Founded in 1939, it is the oldest existing political party in the country.
The CPB initially fought against British colonial forces in Myanmar before joining them in a temporary alliance to expel the invading Imperial Japanese Army during World War II. In the final years of the war, the CPB helped establish a leftist political and military coalition called the Anti-Fascist People's Freedom League (AFPFL). However, the CPB fell out of favour with the more moderate socialists within the AFPFL due to differing views on how an independent Myanmar should be governed. After independence in 1948, the moderate faction became the dominant political force in the AFPFL-led government and began cracking down on the CPB. The CPB's leaders were forced out of the capital Rangoon (present-day Yangon) and into the countryside, and the party consequently began an armed insurrection in Paukkongyi, Pegu Region (present-day Bago Region). The four-decade-long insurgency by the CPB ended with an internal mutiny and the party's leadership fleeing to China.
Following the 2021 Myanmar coup d'état, the CPB's cadres rearmed themselves and reentered Myanmar. The CPB announced it had begun a "people's war" against the State Administration Council, the military junta established after the coup. The CPB maintains cordial relations with the National Unity Government and the People's Defence Force.
History
Founding
The CPB was established in a secret meeting attended by seven men in a small room in Barr Street, Rangoon, on 15 August 1939. The attendees were Thakin Aung San, Thakin Ba Hein, Thakin Bo, Thakin Hla Pe (Bo Let Ya), Thakin Soe, Yèbaw Ba Tin (H. N. Goshal), and Yèbaw Tun Maung (Amar Nag). An armed wing was formed shortly afterwards which fought against British colonial rule and then the invading Imperial Japanese Army upon the start of the Burma campaign of World War II.
World War II (1941–1945) While in Insein Prison in July 1941, Thakin Soe and Thakin Than Tun coauthored the Insein Manifesto, which declared fascism "the major enemy in the coming war" and called for temporary cooperation with the British and the establishment of a broad alliance that would include the Soviet Union. It followed the popular front line advocated by Bulgarian communist leader Georgi Dimitrov at the seventh congress of the Comintern in 1935.
This was against the prevailing opinion of the nationalist We Burmans Association ( or the "Thakins"), including Aung San, who had secretly left Burma in 1940 with a group of young intellectuals, later known as the Thirty Comrades, to receive military training from the Japanese. Aung San and the Thirty Comrades returned to Burma in 1941 and established the Burma Independence Army (BIA) to fight against the Allies. After capturing Rangoon in 1942, the Japanese established a puppet state, the State of Burma, and later installed Aung San as its Deputy Prime Minister in August 1943. The BIA was reorganised as the puppet state's armed forces, the Burma National Army (BNA).
Thakin Soe had gone underground in the Irrawaddy Delta to organise armed resistance soon after the invasion, and Thakin Than Tun, as Minister of Land and Agriculture, was able to pass on intelligence to Thakin Soe. Thakin Thein Pe and Tin Shwe made contact in July 1942 with the exiled colonial government in Simla, India. In January 1944, at a secret meeting near Dedaye in the Delta, the CPB successfully held its first congress, chaired by Thakin Soe.
Aung San became increasingly sceptical of Japan's ability to win the war as time progressed, and in mid-1944, he decided to switch sides, reaching out to his former comrades in the CPB. The CPB, together with the BNA and the People's Revolutionary Party (PSP), formed the Anti-Fascist Organisation (AFO) at a secret meeting in Pegu in August 1944. The AFO was later renamed the Anti-Fascist People's Freedom League (AFPFL) on 3 March 1945. Five days later, on 8 March 1945, the communist commander Ba Htoo of the northwest command based in Mandalay started a rebellion against the Japanese. The rebellion escalated into a national uprising on 27 March 1945, led by the BNA under the command of Aung San. Japanese forces capitulated by July 1945, and the AFPFL became Burma's most influential political party in the post-war years leading up to independence and for several years after independence was achieved.
During the war years, the CPB served as the most effective part of the AFPFL, being behind many of the key political and organisational decisions taken by the organisation, such as organising British support and training for resistance fighters, and holding a pivotal role in the anti-Japanese uprising. Soviet scholars estimated that units under CPB control were behind 50% of Japanese casualties in Burma inflicted by the AFPFL and ended the war with 40,000 guerrillas to their name.
Post-World War II developments (1945–1948) Thakin Soe and Ba Tin travelled to India in September 1945 to talk to the Communist Party of India, and Thakin Soe came back convinced that armed struggle was the only way forward. Amidst widespread strikes starting with the Rangoon Police and mass rallies, the new British governor Hubert Rance offered Aung San and the others seats in the Executive Council. Aung San initially refused the offer but eventually accepted it in September 1946.
In February 1946, Thakin Soe denounced the CPB's leadership, particularly Thakin Thein Pe, accusing them of "Browderism" (after Earl Browder, the former leader of the Communist Party of the United States). Browder argued that armed revolution would no longer be necessary to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat, as world fascism and imperialism had been weakened, making constitutional methods a real option to achieve "national liberation". Thakin Thein Pe, who had replaced Thakin Soe as secretary general, was the leader responsible for the policy paper on strategy entitled Toward Better Mutual Understanding and Greater Cooperation written in India and adopted at the party's second congress at Bagaya Road, Rangoon in July 1945. Thakin Soe broke away from the CPB to form a splinter group called the Communist Party (Burma) or CP(B) for short. The CP(B) was popularly nicknamed the "red flag communists" as they continued to use the CPB's original red-coloured flag. The majority remained with Thakin Than Tun and Thakin Thein Pe and continued to cooperate with the AFPFL; they were nicknamed the "Thein-Than communists" by the Rangoon press and were popularly known as the "white flag communists" for their use of new white-coloured party flags. During negotiations, the British noticed that Thakin Than Tun was the thinker behind Aung San, as Aung San often referred to his brother-in-law for his opinion.
The CPB had abandoned its Browderist line by mid-1946, and a rift that had opened up between the party and Aung San with the socialists culminated in Thakin Than Tun being forced to resign as general secretary of the AFPFL in July, a position he had held since the AFPFL's inception. The CPB was finally expelled from the AFPFL on 2 November 1946 after the communists accused Aung San and the socialists of "kneeling before imperialism", selling out by joining the Executive Council, and calling off the general strike. In the end, the CPB failed to achieve "leftist unity" with Aung San and the socialists led by U Nu and Kyaw Nyein within the AFPFL.
In February 1947, Ba Thein Tin and communist student leader Aung Gyi attended the British Empire Conference of Communist Parties in London, the first time the CPB took part in an international communist forum. After denouncing the elections to the Constituent Assembly that took place the following April, the party fielded 25 junior candidates but won just 7 seats. The assassination of Aung San and his cabinet members on 19 July stunned the CPB as much as the rest of the country, but the party was still anxious to build a united front with the AFPFL to drive the British out of Burma, convinced that the assassination was an imperialist plot to stop Aung San from achieving leftist unity.
U Nu concluded negotiations that Aung San had started with the British premier Clement Attlee in London, and the Nu-Attlee Treaty of October 1947 was condemned as a sham by the communists, the bone of contention in particular being the Let Ya-Freeman Defence Agreement, appended as an annex to the treaty. It provided for an initial period of three years for a British military training mission to remain in the country and a possible future military alliance with Britain. This was to the CPB proof of British intention to subvert Burma's sovereignty and U Nu's capitulation.
U Nu called for a new coalition between communists and socialists on 8 November 1947, urging negotiations between the CPB, the PSP, and the People's Volunteer Organisation (PVO), an association of World War II veterans which served as Aung San's private army. When the attempted coalition failed, U Nu accused the communists of gathering arms for an insurrection. The impact of communist campaigning against the treaty left its mark in Burma's decision not to join the British Commonwealth. Yèbaw Ba Tin, the CPB's Burma-born Bengali theoretician, released a thesis in December 1947 titled, On the Present Political Situation and Our Tasks which set out a revolutionary strategy reviving the slogan "final seizure of power" from the previous January, and called for a "national rising to tear up the treaty of slavery", nationalisation of all British and foreign assets, the abolition of all forms of landlordism and debt, the dismantling of the state bureaucracy and its replacement with a people's government, and alliances and trade agreements with "democratic China, fighting Vietnam and Indonesia" and other democratic countries resisting "Anglo-American imperialist domination". A twofold strategy would be followed: an escalating campaign of strikes by workers and government employees in Rangoon and other cities, and the establishment of "liberated" areas in the countryside to be defended by Red Guards consisting of PVOs trained in guerrilla warfare.
February 1948 saw a wave of strikes in Rangoon by the All Burma Trade Union Congress (ABTUC) backed by the CPB, and in March 1948 a 75,000-strong mass rally by the All Burma Peasants Organisation (ABPO) took place in Pyinmana. U Nu ordered the arrest of the CPB's leaders, convinced that they were planning an uprising on Resistance Day, 27 March, only to find the CPB headquarters at Bagaya empty on the morning of. The party leadership had flown to their stronghold in Pyinmana to start an armed revolution.
Insurgency against the AFPFL (1948–1962)