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We don't have to guess about this. After the usual blaming of Stalin for the failure of the Chinese revolution, Trotsky backed Stalin on the Sino-Soviet conflict of 1929. He ridiculed "ultralefts" who said the USSR was acting liike an imperialist power:

"The theoretical wisdom of the ultralefts in Berlin and Paris boils down to a few democratic abstractions, which have a geographical, not a socialist basis. The Chinese Eastern Railroad runs through Manchuria, which belongs to China. China has a right to self-determination; therefore, the claim of Soviet Russia to this railroad is imperialism. It should be turned over. To whom? To Chiang Kai-shek? Or to the son of Chang Tso-lin?" It would of course have been different "[h]ad the revolution of the Chinese workers and peasants been victorious...The lines would have been turned over to the victorious Chinese people." https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1929/08/sino.htm

Indeed, "it is sheerest nonsense to maintain that the proletarian state is obliged on the whole not to possess enterprises (“concessions“) in other countries. Here Urbahns, in the footsteps of Louzon, is simply taking a backstairs route to the theory of socialism in one country. The question of the workers’ state implanting industrial enterprises in backward countries is not simply an economic question but one of revolutionary strategy. If Soviet Russia has virtually failed to take this path, it was not out of principled considerations but because of technological weakness. Advanced, i.e., highly industrialized, socialist countries like England, Germany and France would be in every way interested in building railways, erecting plants and grain “factories” in backward countries, former colonies, etc. Naturally they will not be able to do this either through coercion or through magnanimous gifts. They would have to receive certain colonial products in exchange. The character of this type of socialist enterprise, their administration, their working conditions would have to be such as to raise the economy and culture of the backward countries with the aid of the capital, technology and experience of the richer proletarian states to the mutual benefit of both sides. This is not imperialism, nor is it exploitation, nor subjugation; it is, on the contrary, the socialist transformation of the world’s economic life. There is no other road at all.

"For example, when the dictatorship of the proletariat is established in England, it will not at all be obliged to make a gift to the Indian bourgeoisie of the existing British concessions. This would be the stupidest possible policy, tending to enormously strengthen the power of the Indian capitalists and feudalists allied with them in relation to the Indian proletariat and peasantry; and it would retard the development of the socialist revolution in India for a long time..." https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1929/09/fi-b.htm
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