Between the 23rd of July and the 2nd of August 1921, the 1st National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) took place, officially uniting the small and scattered groups of Chinese communists into a single organization. The congress was initially held at a house in the French concession of Shanghai but was eventually moved to a boat on the South Lake in Jiaxing after a police search.
In attendance were 13 delegates representing a total of 57 members both in China and abroad. Among them were prominent intellectuals Li Da and Li Hanjun, who were among the first to translate and distribute Marxist literature in China, as well as Chen Duxiu who was elected general secretary in absentia. Also present were Zhou Fohai and Cheng Gongbo, both of whom would later join the nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) before collaborating with the Japanese Fascists. Of these delegates, only Mao Zedong and Bong Biwu remained as members of the CPC when the People’s Republic of China was proclaimed in 1949. Also present were two Comintern representatives, Vladimir Neumann and Henk Sneevliet, both of whom played a significant role in organizing the congress.
Thus, the communist revolution in China began from a collection of small and disorganized study groups whose combined membership never exceeded more than a few hundred during the first years of its existence. By 1924 the CPC had around 1.000 members, by 1927 this number had grown to more than 57.000, and by the end of the War of Resistance Against Japan more than a million would be included in its ranks. As with the Bolsheviks in Russia, the CPC was able to transform the superior quality of its Marxist-Leninist worldview into quantitative growth which accelerated over time until it eventually eclipsed the initially much larger KMT.
Yet history is neither linear nor predetermined: there were both victories and defeats, each victory producing the conditions for a new defeat, and every defeat producing the conditions for a new victory. Tactical retreats transforming into strategic advances, and tactical advances transforming into strategic retreats.
The CPC was the party which had extended its influence among the masses through its alliance with the bourgeois KMT, but it was also the party which paid for its dependency in blood once this United Front was replaced by a White Terror. It was the party which had founded a Chinese Soviet Republic as a beacon in a sea of reaction – one which had tried and failed with each successive wave to drown the revolution. It was the party which after a seemingly endless retreat broke these waves upon the mountains of Yan’an and rekindled the beacon – greatly dimmed but not yet snuffed out. It was the party which turned a historic defeat into a victorious advance that pushed the reactionaries from the mainland and into the sea. It was the party which transformed a mostly pre-industrial peasant society, capitalist in essence though near feudal in form, into an industrial and proletarian society in the process of developing Communism. It was the party which understood that the revolution must be extended to the state and the party itself, being both remnants of bourgeois society which have no right to exist other than that they bring humanity further towards Communism.
Yet it is also the party which, like all other parties before it, eventually succumbed to the internal contradictions which they had themselves created. The party which, instead of advancing the revolution, chose to stand still in the stream of history until its current swept them back to bourgeois society. Today, both the Chinese state and the CPC have become but another instrument of the bourgeoisie in service of the capital cycle such as so many other “communist” parties have become. China has not only reintroduced capitalism but has become one of the most powerful imperialist countries in the world second only to the United States, demanding another redivision of the world so it too may have its “rightful” share.
This is the history of the Communist Party of China whose contributions to the Communist revolution we must study in its totality, and not through the fossilized remnants of the past. It is an example of how a small and inexperienced group of communists transformed itself through a correct worldview, strategy and tactics into a Communist Party. At the same time, it expresses the different conditions that separate the original constitution of the International Communist Movement (ICM) from the current task of its reconstitution.
It is no longer sufficient to gather an eclectic group of communists into a formal organization, or to unite the ICM around a vague set of “principles” whose content remains disputed and undefined. The victory and defeat of the previous revolutionary cycle have not only produced new contradictions for which there are no ready-made solutions but also allows for and necessitates that contemporary Communists begin from a higher stage than at the beginning of the revolutionary cycle. The fossilized traditions of the past have ossified Marxism and obscured its revolutionary essence, now it is our task to recover and develop it – to fight with all our being for the emancipation of humanity from itself.
For the Reconstitution of Communism!
Proletarians of all countries, unite!
