History of China Page 1 of 15

HISTORY

Subject : History
(For under graduate student.)

Paper No. : Paper- VIII

History of China

Unit, Chapter : Unit- 1

Chapter- 5

Topic No. & Title : Part- 3

Communist Movement in
China – Part 1

Abstract: The Communist movement in China started in

1921—the year the Communist Party of China (CPC) was
born. Both the May 4 Movement of 1919 and the October
Revolution of 1917 contributed in their own ways to the birth
of the CPC. Mao tse-tung was closely associated with the
whole process of Party building and the Chinese revolution
and became the Chairman of the CPC at the Tsunyi
Conference of 1935—a post he had held till he died in 1976.
The Chinese revolution was divided into two distinct stages.
The first was the stage of the New Democratic Revolution
(NDR), during which feudalism and imperialism and the
comprador big bourgeoisie were the three main targets of
History of China Page 2 of 15

attack. It ended with the accomplishment of the NDR in 1949.

The second was the Socialist Revolution (SR), and by 1956,
the socialist transformation of China was in the main
accomplished. In this Part, we will deal with the emergence of
Mao as a political leader, the creation of the first revolutionary
bases on the Ching Kang-shan Mountains and the Long
March(1934-35) from south China to north China to fight the
Japanese aggressors.

Rise of Mao Tse-tung

Mao Tse-tung was born in 1893 in village Shao-shan,
Hsiangtan county in the Hunan province of China in a poor
peasant family. Mao told Edgar Snow, the American reporter,
in 1936 that when he was 10 his father had already become a
middle peasant and somewhat supplemented his income by
small trading. After attending a traditional primary school, he
enrolled himself in a higher school in Tungshan. It is from his
arrival at this school and his exposure to the wider busy
market town that we can date the real beginning of Mao‘s
intellectual and political development. It brought for him not
only a broader contact with the problems of the world as a
whole, but new personal experiences of the stratification of
the Chinese society. The years at Changsha proved to be very
History of China Page 3 of 15

important in Mao‘s life. The intellectually alert and politically

conscious student body in Changsha provided Mao with an
ideal training ground for his apprenticeship as a political
worker. There he got friends and comrades some of whom
were to follow his leadership until the final victory in 1949.

Mao is said to have led a Spartan way of life at the Changsha

school. He used to take a cold bath every day in summer and
in winter and was very fond of swimming and
mountaineering. In 1916, he travelled over a large area in
Hunan, living on beans and water or sometimes on nothing.
Such physical toughening was to prove very useful when he
led the First Front Army on the Long March in 1934-35.

In 1917, when Mao was at Changsha, he formed the New

People’s Study Society which, in some way or other, played
an important role in the future course of the Chinese
revolution. Although this society did neither have any political
identity, nor have any concrete programme of action, the
members accepted the method of arriving at truth from social
practice, as developed by Mao. This method became in course
of time the method of the CPC.
History of China Page 4 of 15

In September 1918, Mao went to Peking, where he met

intellectuals like Li Ta Chao, librarian and professor of Political
Economy, Chen Tu-hsiu, the dean of the Faculty of Letters
and many others. He got a job as an assistant in the library of
Peking University and that helped him get acquainted with the
writings of Kropotkin, Bakunin and Tolstoy along with Marxist
writings. Mao had full admiration for Li Ta-chao, who was the
first to introduce Marxist thought to China‘s intelligentsia and
was to be killed by Chiang Kai-shek‘s troops in 1927. The
coming of the May 4 Movement found China in convulsion.
Mao along with other members of the newly-formed New
Citizens’ Society issued broadsheets calling for a strike as well
as the establishment of a students‘ union in Hunan. The anti-
Confucianism, the demand for democracy and science and
praise for Marxism, which characterized the May 4 Movement,
were zealously accepted by Mao. Among the significant
articles that Mao wrote during the May 4th Movement were
those concerning the emancipation of women which were
published in Hsiang River Review, New Hunan, Women’s Bell
etc. In those articles written during pre-Communist Party
days, Mao could make it clear that the task of the
emancipation of women was inextricably linked with social
revolution in China. The Communist Party of China was
History of China Page 5 of 15

formed in July 1921 on a boat on South China Lake in the

Chekiang province. Mao became the secretary of the CPC for
the Hunan province. One of the first acts of Mao was organize
and lead a series of strikes in Hunan, of which those among
the Anyuan coal miners and railroad workers were
remarkable.

Meanwhile, the international political context in which he

worked was about to undergo a radical change. At the
Second Congress of the Comintern held in 1920, Lenin came
out with a thesis on alliance with the bourgeoisie in the
underdeveloped countries, known as the ―Thesis on Colonial
Questions‖. Lenin advocated that the Communist
International should enter into a temporary alliance with
bourgeois democracy in colonial and other underdeveloped
countries, but must not merge with it and must preserve the
independence of the proletarian movement even in a
rudimentary form.

That signalled a debate within the CPC at its Third Congress

held in 1923 at Canton on whether an alliance should be
made with the Kuomintang (KMT) led by Sun Yat-sen. There
were two tendencies which were identified as deviations of
History of China Page 6 of 15

one type or another. According to one view represented by

Chen Tu-hsiu, since the present revolution was of a
bourgeois-democratic character, it would be led by the
bourgeoisie and the working class would play only a passive
role in it. After the accomplishment of the bourgeois
revolution, the second revolution—the socialist revolution
would begin, and that was to be led by the working class. This
tendency was regarded as ‗capitulationism‘. According to the
other view represented by Chang Kuo-tao, the revolution was
to be not of a two-stage one, but of a single stage. Since the
KMT, according to them, was not revolutionary, the CPC
should not cooperate with it and that the proletariat should
carry on the revolution solely under the banner of the CPC.
This tendency was regarded as ‗sectarianism‘. The Congress
criticized both these deviations and decided that the CPC
should help the KMT develop its organization and at the same
time recruit advanced workers into the CPC. This congress,
however, failed either to thoroughly solve the question of
leadership in the revolution, or pay due attention to the
peasant question or the question of the revolutionary army.
Thus was formed the First United Front (1924-27)
between the CPC and the KMT. It was directed against the
Northern Warlords and their imperialist masters. By then, Sun
History of China Page 7 of 15

Yat-sen also defined his Three Major Policies of alliance with

the Soviet Union, cooperation with the CPC and assistance to
the workers and peasants. Sun Yat-sen‘s new Three Principles
of the People advocated opposition to imperialism and
feudalism and the establishment of a democratic coalition
government of all revolutionary classes. As these principles
were basically in agreement with the programme of the CPC
during the period of the bourgeois-democratic revolution,
these naturally became the political basis of the KMT-CPC
cooperation. And the Whampoa Military Academy was formed
in Canton to give necessary military training for creating a
revolutionary army to carry on the Northern Expedition
against the warlord troops of Wu Pei-fu and Sun chuan-fang.
And by December 1926, it seemed all but certain that with
the support of the broad masses, this national revolutionary
army would defeat the imperialists and the warlords and bring
about the independence and unification of China.

However, by then the revolutionary camp became disunited.

Sun Yat-sen died in 1925 and at the beginning of the
expedition, Chiang Kai-shek, the KMT leader usurped the post
of C-in-C, and gradually he started to fill all top administrative
and military posts under his control and established a system
History of China Page 8 of 15

of counter-revolutionary dictatorship. Meanwhile, the armies

under the leadership and influence of the CPC and the left-
wing of the KMT smashed the main forces of the warlords and
set up their centre at Wuhan, as opposed to Nanking under
Chiang Kai-shek.

Hunan peasant rising and „Hunan Report‟

The victorious advance of the Northern Expeditionary Army
towards the Yangtze Valley made Hunan the centre of the
nation-wide peasant movement. At that time few people
seemed to understand the importance and potentialities of
the Chinese peasants. To Chen Tu-hsiu, the first secretary of
the CPC, it was impracticable to organize peasants into the
ranks of the revolution. However, despite the leadership, the
peasants of Hunan rose in a great movement. This could
never be separated from Mao‘s revolutionary activities. From
1925 to 1926 Mao had been running the National Institute of
Peasant Movement in Canton. At the time of the Northern
Expedition, he went to Shanghai to take the post of Chairman
of the committee on the peasant movement. Then he
proceeded to Wuhan to be in charge of the National Peasant
Association. The aim of the Canton institute was to prepare
cadres ideologically to go to the villages to help peasants get
History of China Page 9 of 15

organized for struggle and in this way also to declass

themselves.

At the end of 1925, the Hunan students studying at Canton

went into the midst of peasants and formed peasant
associations. By November 1926, peasant associations
formed in the counties of Hunan had a membership of 13 to
14 lakhs. These associations became the sole organ of
peasant authority in the countryside. Through them, the
peasants carried on anti-feudal political, economic and
ideological struggles in a vigorous way and smashed the
power of the landlord class and established the authority of
the peasant association. They effected reduction in rent,
opposed clan authority, theocratic authority and the authority
of the husband. Night schools were opened and peasant
militia was organized for self-defence.

In support of the peasant struggles, Mao went to Hunan in

January 1927 to make an investigation and wrote the
“Report of an investigation into the Peasant Movement
in Hunan”. This report fully appraised the role of the
peasants in the Chinese revolution. Hofheinz in his book The
Broken Wave points out that in that Hunan Report, Mao‘s
History of China Page 10 of 15

message had three parts. First, he asserted the emergence of

a new revolutionary situation in Hunan. Second, Mao singled
out a new force of the Chinese revolution—the peasantry.
Third, Mao adopted a new attitude towards violence. A rural
revolution is a revolution by which the peasantry overthrows
the authority of the feudal forces. This revolutionary violence
as opposed to the counter-revolutionary is not to be
deplored; it is to be celebrated. This report later led to a
controversy among scholars known as the ‗Maoism
controversy‘ to which we have earlier referred. Essentially,
one opinion is that here Mao, by taking the centre of
revolution from the classical model of city-based and working
class-based revolution (like that in Russia), had taken it to
the villages and made the peasantry the leader of the
revolution. This, according to this opinion, was one of Mao‘s
new contributions to Marxism-Leninism. The other opinion is
that Mao‘s contribution lies in giving the peasantry—so long
unrecognized by all---its due; but the leadership would be
given, like that in Russia, by the working class.

Meanwhile, the advance of the northern expeditionary army

was followed by a workers‘ uprising in Shanghai in February
1927. In April 1927, Chiang Kai-shek with the backing of the
History of China Page 11 of 15

British, Japanese and American forces, sent his troops against

workers and killed many thousands. The Shanghai massacre
formally put an end of the united front between the CPC and
the KMT.

At that critical juncture, the CPC, in order to salvage the

revolution from defeat, organized an armed uprising in
Nanchang, Kiangsi on 1 August 1927 with about 30,000
troops under the command of Chou En-lai and Chu Teh.
Although this was ultimately defeated, the Nanchang rising
had great historical significance. It marked the beginning of
the struggle of the revolutionary forces under the sole
leadership of the CPC. It also marked the birth of the Red
Army.

An emergency conference of the central committee of the CPC

was held on 7 August at Kiukiang in Kiangsi where the
capitulationist line of Chen Tu-hsiu was criticized, the need for
an agrarian revolution was recorded and decision was taken
for the autumn harvest uprising. Mao organized the miners
from the Anyuan colliery, the KMT Guards Regiment under
CPC influence and the peasants into the Workers‘ and
Peasants‘ Army. The rising took place on 8 September, but
History of China Page 12 of 15

suffered losses. The army then marched according to plan to

the Chingkangshan Mountains on the Hunan-Kiangsi border.
There the first revolutionary base was set up in October 1927.

The Nanchang rising was followed by the Canton uprising in

December 1927 under the CPC. A democratic government of
workers and peasants known as the Canton commune was
established. However, due to attacks from the KMT troops
under cover of US, British and Japanese gunboats as also
failure to coordinate with the peasant risings led to its rapid
defeat. All this proved that it was impossible to occupy big
cities like Canton for long when revolution was at a low ebb
and the revolutionary were greatly outnumbered.

Mao at that time had to fight against two deviations. One was
the ‗Right‘ deviation of Chen Tu-hsui which advocated a policy
of total retreat by withdrawing all forces from the battlefield.
The other was the ‗Left‘ deviation of Chu Chiu Pai, which
denied that the revolution should go by stages and advocated
a policy of ―continuous upsurge‖ even after the failure in 1927
and hoped to capture big cities.
History of China Page 13 of 15

Revolutionary Bases on the Chingkangshan Mountains

The failure of the Autumn Harvest Uprising forced Mao to take
refuge in the isolated mountain range of Chingkangshan on
the Hunan-Kiangsi border. He was joined by another military
group headed by Chu Teh—a former warlord-minded official,
now turned communist. Thus the first revolutionary base of
the Chinese Red Army was formed.

J. Chesneaux writes that the process which led the Chinese

Communists to the peasantry was an external one; it came
from the towns. The essential motivation for this shift was the
ned to pursue the struggle in the least unfavourable
conditions possible. It was a new strategy and the new
elements of this strategy began to appear in some of Mao‘s
writings. These were: Why is it that Red Political Power can
exist in China? (1928), The Struggle in the Chingkang
Mountains (1928) and A Single Spark can Start a Prairie Fire
(1930). Armed struggle depended on the existence of
geographically limited revolutionary bases. The Chingkang
Mountains are covered with forests and it is wild life that
reigned. In such a situation, it was possible to seize powere
and retain it, without necessarily achieving victory throughout
the country. An important difference with the 1917
History of China Page 14 of 15

revolutionary process was that the insurgent regions in China

were the backward economically, the least integrated into the
market economy and the most tenuously controlled by the
central government. This was a major departure from the
classical thesis, which assigned the leading role in the
revolution to the most developed zones, where there were
modern industry and an industrial proletariat. This strategy
also implied a prolonged struggle. There was no question of
seizing power in a few days or hours, no prospect of victory
or defeat, as in Paris in 1871, Petrograd in 1927 or Shanghai
in 1927. The struggle was to last for many years.

Accordingly, between 1928 and 1930, eleven main insurgent

bases were set up. They were located in bordering areas
between provinces which had always served as refuges for
the outlaws of China. There the enemy administration was
weakest and because of inter-provincial rivalries among the
KMT warlords, it was difficult for them to launch joint
operations from several directions. At the same time, the red
zones were within striking distance of the urban centres like
Nanchang, Wuhan and Changsha which they could both
dominate and threaten.
History of China Page 15 of 15

In the insurgent bases, the Communists gave priority to the

rapid development of political institutions and local organs of
stat power. In November 1931, a conference was held at
Juichin where Mao became the Chairman of the Chinese
Soviet Republic. The Constitution of the Republic affirmed
that all power belonged ‗to the workers‘ soviets. Its labour
law provided for an eight-hour working day, workers‘
insurance against sickness etc. Its agrarian law envisaged the
confiscation, without compensation, of feudal holdings and
their distribution among the poor peasants.

However, the policy of giving precedence to the agrarian

revolution was not supported by the CPC leadership in
general. Mao and Chu Teh represented a minority line. They
directed Mao to attack the cities. After several misfortunes,
Mao and Chu Teh simply refused to execute the directives
they received. Such divisions in the CPC policy towards the
peasant movement constitute one of the main causes of the
final collapse of the Kiangsi Soviet. Four successive
campaigns of ‗encirclement and suppression‘ were beaten off
with increasing difficulty. The fifth in 1934 could not be. It
forced the CPC to start on its historic Long March.