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From Friend to Comrade: The Founding of the Chinese Communist Party, 1920-1927

University of California Press

Chinese communists have attracted scholarly attention in the past. Why, then, this study? In recent years, historians and archivists in the People's Republic of China (PRC) have produced a mountain of new primary sources on the early history of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). What drew me to this mountain was the thought that a study of the organizational development of the early CCP had not yet been written. Past scholars have produced biographies of important Chinese communists, and they have examined ideological developments, CCP-Comintern relations, and the CCP's early peasant and labor movements. But none have put the CCP at the center of the story.

Previous writers have argued that Chinese communists established a true Leninist party with a centralized organization firmly asserting an ideology within a short time after the formal establishment of the CCP at its First Congress in July 1921. This study argues that this was a much more complicated process, which lasted until 1927 and involved deep changes in the norms of behavior and styles of action of CCP members. It was only in 1927 that they presented and treated the CCP as more than the sum of their total—as the Party. At the time of its formal inauguration, few CCP members had a firm concept of their party or what they wished it to stand for. Organizationally, it was a loose confederation of Marxist-Leninist study societies. In subsequent years, Chinese communists struggled to give meaning to the CCP while making it the framework of their political activities. They frequently collided over such issues as the distribution of authority, the correct attitude of individual members to the CCP, and the structure of their relationship with Chinese society. The CCP as a larger-than-life organization with its own culture was not a reality before 1927.

The first chapter places the spread of communism in China in the context of China's political crisis. While the 1911 Revolution had overthrown the dynastic order, the growing assertion of warlordism afterward and the spreading abuse of political power produced a situation in which many of China's educated elite expressed anger and frustration with what they saw as the brutalization of politics. The first chapter discusses the growing alienation from the Republic of those early CCP members for whom sufficient material exists to study the development of their thinking prior to the establishment of the CCP. Marxism-Leninism, with its depiction of politics as dominated by an exploitative elite, fitted their perception of politics as debased by elite profiteering, and they couched their decision to seek the ouster of political institutions of the Republic in its terms.

One of the principal attractions of Marxism-Leninism to Chinese communists was that it seemed to offer effective ways to confront China's political crisis. Most had been involved in study societies, which in the past had been used by elites as vehicles to promote political causes in the dynastic bureaucracy. Study societies had blossomed among China's new student population after the New Culture movement began in 1915. However, as the grip of warlordism on political institutions tightened and the republican political order showed itself impervious to calls for reform, debates in study societies broke out about the effectiveness of the societies to promote an honorable politics. The discussions dealt with such issues as whether society members should seek change by promoting new ideas or by seizing political power, whether participation in a political party would corrupt their moral integrity, and whether it was appropriate to combine on the basis of one ideology. In these discussions and in their writings of this time, future members of the CCP began to use Marxism-Leninism to formulate new political norms and advance new principles of political organization and action. It was as a result of this ferment that the first communist organizations were established.

The second chapter describes the activities of these organizations, which I call cells. The chapter discusses their formation and activities up to the First CCP Congress of July 1921. It suggests that the CCP was not the result of a central initiative but that in various places in China and abroad, Chinese established communist cells at more or less the same time, in some cases in ignorance of activities elsewhere. It also seeks to demonstrate that in general Chinese communists lacked a concept of a centralized leadership possessing ideological authority, or of a party having an exclusive claim on their time and their attachments. The chapter denies the centrality of Shanghai in the early CCP and emphasizes the relative autonomy of communist cells as well as the differences between them.

The CCP that emerged after the First Congress was fragmented. While the CCP's regional branches proved cohesive, its members looked toward CCP institutions and congresses in much the same way they had viewed those of study societies. Institutions lacked the power to enforce their decisions, and congresses were considered occasions for discussion and debate rather than mechanisms for drawing up plans of action and securing partywide implementation. Diversity of opinion existed about a range of topics, including the internal organization of the CCP and even whether it should develop a labor movement without procedures or shared norms providing ways to arrive at a settlement of the resulting conflicts. In 1923 central leadership collapsed completely in the CCP, in part as a result of the lack of organizational cohesion. At the same time, warlords and rural elites destroyed the CCP's labor and peasant movements, mostly because of the naiveté of CCP members about power relations in Chinese society and their vain confidence that workers and peasants would immediately grant them their allegiance. Chapter 3 first describes how the CCP nearly died a premature death between 1921 and 1923. It then analyzes how in the wake of these difficulties CCP members for the first time explored actively the organizational structures and techniques that Marxism-Leninism had to offer.

It was the May Thirtieth movement of 1925 that breathed life into the CCP. In 1925 CCP membership was still slightly under 1,000; two years later, it had grown to more than 57,000. CCP members had led huge mass movements, both in the city and in the countryside: the party had broken out of its social and urban isolation, its members came from all social strata, and it possessed an organizational presence in most urban centers and in much of the countryside of southern China. The same men who had still acted as modern Confuciuses in the early years of the CCP now could be found serving on committees with peasants and workers. They infiltrated gangs and Triads, and their long theoretical essays had made way for agitprop. They procured arms and instigated riots, and in public they all asserted one ideological line. It was a new world.

The fourth chapter seeks to demonstrate how CCP-society relations—and CCP conceptions of these—developed after the May Thirtieth movement. The movement was an open invitation for CCP members to create a "mass party," a party well embedded in Chinese society. To create a mass base, the CCP's challenge was to loosen...