[GM 104] Origins of the Chinese Communist Party

A historical overview, derived from previous party work, gave us an understanding of how the bourgeois industrial revolution gained a hold in China within the context of the colonial wars known as the “Opium Wars”. The Celestial Empire collapses and is split apart after losing the war with the Western powers. The mechanism of repeated peasant revolts and redistribution of the land, which had created that millennial stability across various dynasties, would be destroyed for ever.

At the beginning of the 20th century the new relations of production start to emerge. First the Taiping rebellion and then the Boxer Rising foretell the collapse of the Empire and the reunification of China as a single state.

All of the Western Imperialist powers see China as the solution to their own crises and contradictions, through the establishment of industries in a country where extremely high rates of exploitation were possible. A small but concentrated proletariat is formed within and around the zones where imperialist influence holds sway, in the railways and in the ports.

The Kuomintang, the ideological expression of Chinese populism inspired by Sun Yat-sen, is a political party and revolutionary democratic movement which had already been organised before 1911 and had exerted a certain influence on the popular masses, even if exclusively in the province of Guang Dong.

In 1911 an attempted bourgeois political revolution, led initially by Sun Yat-sen, immediately degenerates and power falls into the hands of local cliques, diffused throughout the territory. The Chinese bourgeoisie, tied to the interests of the imperialists, has neither the strength nor the courage to express its interests in a national State.

The highest expression of the more or less national and nationalist revolutionary bourgeoisie appears in 1919 with the ‘May 4 Movement’, which is born of the vain hope, promptly dashed, of having some weight and consideration at the Versailles Congress, that gathering of brigands which assembled to divide up the booty after the First World War.

From that time up until 1927 the entire period falls under the banner of workers’ and proletarian struggles. The formation of the CCP will be purely determined by material factors: the arising of new class relations, the birth of the proletariat and proletarian struggle, the victory of the dictatorship in Russia, the beginning of the communist revolutionary cycle throughout the world.

China was faced with what Marxism has defined as “permanent revolution”, with the proletarian vanguard, the Communist Party, having to take on the responsibility of achieving the programme of revolutionary democracy as well. Due to this factor, on the tactical level, it derived the support, extending up to temporary alliance, of the revolutionary national democratic movement, as endorsed by the theses of the Second Congress of the CI.

Indeed, the 1920 theses gave a decisive stimulus to the formation of the CCP, whose first congress would take place in July 1921. From 1920 onwards groups of communists had formed in four or five cities. The CI would lend them its support and help to coordinate those still limited forces.