A Visit to the Birthplace of the Chinese Communist Party

Site of the First National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party.

From China Reconstructs Magazine, 1972

By TANG YING-KUANG

ON Hsingyeh Street in Shanghai stands an ordinary two-story building of grey brick, with arch shaped lintels above doors with brass-covered iron knockers. Here, in a front room on the ground floor, the founding meeting of the Communist Party of China began its sessions. The building is now preserved as a historical site, with the long table and twelve stools arranged in the 20-square-meter room as they were at the time.

On July 1, 1921, at a dark hour in the history of the Chinese people, twelve delegates, sent by the various communist groups and representing a total of seventy members, convened the Party's First National Congress there. Chairman Mao attended as delegate of the Hunan province communist group. The founding in semi-feudal semi-colonial China of a proletarian political party guided by Marxism-Leninism brought fundamental changes in the Chinese revolution. In the half century since then, with leadership from the Party and Chairman Mao, the Chinese people have defeated powerful enemies both at home and abroad, overthrown the reactionary rule of imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat-capitalism, fulfilled the tasks of the democratic revolution and embarked on socialist revolution and socialist construction, in which they have achieved great victories.

The room where the congress was held.

Historical Experience

Visitors to the site cannot help but recall the long and arduous struggles of the Chinese people be fore the founding of the Communist Party of China. In 1840 British imperialism, by perpetrating the Opium War, opened the door of China with guns and cannons. In the years that followed, various other imperialist powers many times carried on aggressive war against China. Under their impact China's feudal society gradually became a semi-feudal and semi-colonial one. In order to protect its reactionary rule, the feudal ruling class adopted a line of submission towards imperialism, actually colluding with them to ruthlessly exploit and oppress the laboring people.

In the 80 years that preceded 1921, the Chinese people, suffering under imperialism and feudalism, waged many heroic struggles. However, all — including the peasant revolution of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom begun in 1851 and the 1911 bourgeois revolution led by Dr. Sun Yat-sen — ended in failure. The Taiping revolution had held out for 14 years. It dealt a telling blow to the feudal forces and the foreign invaders and shook the rule of the Ching dynasty. The Taiping peasant rebels, being small producers limited by their backward mode of production, were unable to propose a new social system which could replace the feudal one, so their revolution failed.

The 1911 Revolution led by the bourgeoisie overthrew the Ching dynasty and put an end to the monarchy which had been China's ancient form of feudal political power for more than 2,000 years. Owing to their political weakness and their proneness to compromise, however, the bourgeoisie could not mobilize the broad masses of the laboring people, especially the peasants, to join the revolution and wage a resolute struggle against the enemy. Their revolution ended in failure, with the task of overthrowing imperialism and feudalism unaccomplished.

Chinese history has shown that in the era of imperialism neither the peasant class nor the bourgeoisie in China were able to lead the anti-imperialist and anti-feudal democratic revolution to victory. "Without the leadership of the working class revolution fails". Chairman Mao has said in a penetrating summing-up of this historical experience. Therefore, the responsibility for leading the revolution could not but fall upon the shoulders of China's working class.

By perpetrating aggression against China, the imperialists were creating their own grave diggers. As imperialist-run enterprises and national industry grew, China's working class also grew in strength. At the time of the First World War (1914-1918) the modern industrial proletariat in China numbered about two million. They represented China's new productive forces, the most progressive class in modern China. The three fold oppression they faced — by imperialism, the bourgeois and the feudal forces — made them firmer and more thoroughgoing in making revolution than any other class. In 1919 when the anti-imperialist May Fourth Movement burst forth, the Chinese working class responded with the first big political strike in China's history. It had stepped upon the political stage as an independent class. This was the class basis for the formation of the Chinese Communist Party.

Marxism-Leninism Spreads

The growth of the workers' movement and the speedy rise of the Chinese revolutionary movement was accompanied by the spread of Marxism-Leninism. The workers' movement was the class basis for the Communist Party of China and Marxism-Leninism was its ideological basis; the Party is the product of bringing these two together.

The victory of the October Socialist Revolution in 1917 by the Russian proletariat under the leadership of Lenin opened a new era in world history. It illuminated the path for the Chinese revolution and brought the ideological weapon of Marxism-Leninism to China's progressive intellectuals, who had long been searching for the true way to liberation. As Chairman Mao has put it, "The salvoes of the October Revolution brought us Marxism-Leninism. The October Revolution helped progressives in China, as throughout the world, to adopt the proletarian world outlook as the instrument for studying a nation's destiny and considering anew their own problems. Follow the path of the Russians — that was their conclusion." It was at that time that Marxism-Leninism began to find its way to China and its classics like The Communist Manifesto and books concerning the October Revolution were translated and published in China.

The May Fourth Movement accelerated the spread of Marxism Leninism in China. The movement began with intellectuals who, influenced by the October Revolution, had come to realize that only by rising up and struggling could China be saved from its national crisis. In January 1919 those imperialist powers who had won the First World War met in the Paris Peace Conference to redivide the colonial world. The meeting decided that Japan would take over the special privileges Germany had had in China's Shantung province. The reactionary warlord government in China was preparing to have its representative sign the Treaty of Versailles. This news, on reaching China, aroused a storm of mass protest. On May 4 Peking students demonstrated, shouting, "Uphold our sovereignty and punish the traitors!" Students in other places quickly took up the call with parades and strikes.

On June 3 and 4 when the reactionary government arrested a large number of the patriotic students, the people became even more furious and the working class threw itself into the struggle. Following a big strike in Shanghai on June 5, workers in many other cities held strikes and demonstrations. Influenced by the workers, merchants in Shanghai and other important cities closed their doors. The movement had soon swept through more than 150 cities in nearly two dozen provinces.

The patriotic movement, originally begun with intellectuals as the main force, developed into a resolute nationwide revolutionary struggle against imperialism and feudalism, drawing in the proletariat, urban petty bourgeoisie and national bourgeoisie. It struck at the reactionary warlord government, forcing it to release all the jailed students, remove the traitorous officials and refuse to sign the Versailles Treaty. The working class played a decisive role in achieving this victory.

Through their own experience in the struggle a large number of intellectuals realized that the Chinese revolution could be victorious only by relying on the working class and taking the theory of Marxism Leninism as their guide. Armed with this new understanding they began to go among the workers, propagating Marxism-Leninism and organizing workers' movements. In this way the May Fourth Movement helped spread the theory of Marxism-Leninism more widely and link it with the workers' movement. This laid the ideological foundation for the founding of the Communist Party and prepared cadres for it.

As early as April 1918 Chairman Mao had established the revolutionary Society of the New Masses. During the May Fourth Movement he led anti-feudal and anti-imperialist struggles with Hunan province as his base. In July 1919 in Changsha he set up the Hsiang-chiang Review, a weekly which enthusiastically publicized Marxism-Leninism and the idea of fighting imperialism and feudalism. In it he wrote of the immense power of the laboring people's united struggle. It called on the youth to go among the worker and peasant masses, and under its guidance many revolutionary intellectuals went to the workers to spread Marxism-Leninism. In July 1920, Chairman Mao formed the Cultural Book Society in Changsha. He himself frequently sent workers books and newspapers propagating Marxist-Leninist ideas. The book society had seven branches in other counties in Hunan. Soon afterwards Chairman Mao organized the communist group in Changsha. It was the most advanced in the country and its orientation was the correct one. About the same time other communist groups were established in Shanghai, Peking, Kwangchow, Hupeh and Shantung provinces and among Chinese students in Japan and France.

Comrade Mao in 1919

Founding of the Party

The Party's founding congress on July 1, 1921 in the house in Shanghai's French concession was a secret one, but something must have aroused the attention of the French imperialist authorities. On the night of the fourth day a stranger burst into the meeting room through the back door of the house, saying he was looking for someone. He apologized for having entered the wrong place and left, but the delegates feared he might be a member of the imperialists' secret police. They decided to leave the house at once. Fifteen minutes later the place was raided by the police, but they found nothing but an empty house. From the day of its birth the Party was to experience such struggles.

The meeting was resumed on the fifth day on a rented tourist boat on Nanhu Lake in Chiahsing, Chekiang province.

At that time, there was a struggle between two lines on what kind of party should be built. Chairman Mao advocated that the Party be built on the principles of Marxism-Leninism. Its fundamental task was to seize political power through violent revolution and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat in China. While the Party's ultimate goal should be to build a communist society, at the present stage it should first lead the democratic revolution, which had the aim of overthrowing imperialism and feudalism. Chairman Mao repudiated the Right opportunist view that a disciplined and militant political party of the working class was not necessary; that it would be sufficient to have an open organization to study Marxism-Leninism and to carry on legal propaganda activities; that it was not necessary for it to participate in the workers' movement or actual political struggles.

At the same time he also repudiated the "Left" closed-doorism which held that the Party should not lead the bourgeois-democratic revolution, carry on open and legal activities, and admit any intellectuals to membership.

After a fierce struggle the Marxist-Leninist line represented by Chairman Mao defeated the "Left" and Right opportunist lines. The Congress proclaimed the establishment of the Communist Party of China, adopted its first constitution and elected its leading body.

The appearance in China of a militant political party of the proletariat with Marxism-Leninism as its guide opened a new era in Chinese history. As Chairman Mao has put it, "With the birth of the Communist Party of China, the face of the Chinese revolution took on an altogether new aspect." Since then the Party, following the Marxist-Leninist line represented by Chairman Mao, has been constantly consolidated and developed. Neither the aircraft and artillery of the imperialists and the Kuomintang reactionaries, the white terror and bloody suppression of the enemy nor repeated interference and subversion from Right and "Left" opportunist lines could destroy the Party.

Instead, through long and arduous struggle it has become the Party which is leading the People's Republic of China. Semi colonial and semi-feudal old China has now been transformed into socialist new China which has attained an initial prosperity.