May Fourth and the founding of the Chinese Communist Party

Disillusion with the republic and the founding of New Youth

1915 was the year disillusion with the republic left by the 1911 Revolution reached its depth. In January Japan presented the Twenty-One Demands, and six months later it was clear that Yuan Shikai meant to make himself emperor. Chinese students in Japan protested, and Li Dazhao, then at Waseda University, became a leader of the student protest against the demands and wrote a long manifesto sent to the Beijing government. Chen Duxiu, who had fled to Japan after the failure of the Second Revolution and had even thought of retiring from politics, concluded that the problem lay not in political institutions but in the culture and values beneath them. 1 2 3

On 15 September 1915 Chen Duxiu launched Youth Magazine in Shanghai, with the Qunyi publishing house paying him 200 yuan a month for manuscripts and editing. His “Call to Youth” in the first issue set out six challenges: be independent, not servile; progressive, not conservative; in the forefront, not lagging behind; internationalist, not isolationist; practical, not rhetorical; scientific, not superstitious. When the Shanghai YMCA complained the next September that the title was too close to its own, the magazine became New Youth, and the word “new” suited its cause. 4 3

The magazine attacked Confucian ethics as the foundation of autocracy: so long as Confucian ethics tied the individual to family and ruler, the republic would exist in name only. “Mr. Democracy” and “Mr. Science” replaced “Mr. Confucius” as slogans, and Chen wrote that only these two gentlemen could save China from its political, moral, academic and intellectual darkness. Superstition and religion were also condemned as causes of backwardness. At a time when Yuan Shikai’s regime revived Confucian rites and there were moves to write Confucian values into law, anti-Confucianism was a politics against restoration. 3 5 1 6 4

Peking University and the literary revolution

Cai Yuanpei, back from France in 1916, became chancellor of Peking University the next year. Minister of education after the 1911 Revolution and sympathetic to anarchism, he brought together at Peking University scholars of every persuasion, from Chen Duxiu, Li Dazhao and Hu Shih to the philosopher Liang Shuming and the historian Gu Jiegang. When Chen Duxiu was appointed dean of letters in January 1917, New Youth moved its base to Beijing. Li Dazhao joined the editorial board in January 1918 and in February, at Cai’s invitation, became chief librarian of the university. Volume 6 was edited in rotation by Chen Duxiu, Qian Xuantong, Gao Yihan, Hu Shih, Li Dazhao and Shen Yinmo: a local magazine of Anhui writers had become a national one run by Peking University professors. 7 4 2 1

Hu Shih, a student of John Dewey in the United States, published “A Preliminary Discussion of Literature Reform” in New Youth in January 1917, setting out eight guidelines for writers and proposing to write in the spoken vernacular instead of the classical language. Chen Duxiu pushed this further as a “literary revolution”. In April 1918 Hu called for “a literature of the national language, a national language of literature”, arguing that classical Chinese, which had bound scholars for millennia, was a dead language and the vernacular a living one. Under the slogan “my hand writes what my mouth speaks”, the vernacular became the style of textbooks and newspapers within a few years, and this revolution in language later opened the way for mass parties to reach people who could barely read. 8 4 5

In May 1918 Lu Xun published “Diary of a Madman” in New Youth. Inspired by Gogol’s story of the same name, it records a scholar’s growing suspicion that the Confucian classics brainwash people into cannibalism, indicting the old society as a history of man-eating. Lu Xun followed it in the same magazine with “Kong Yiji” and “Medicine”. Long counted the first vernacular fiction, it is now noted that Chen Hengzhe’s “One Day”, published in an overseas students’ quarterly in 1917, came a year earlier. New Youth also took up chastity, free love and marriage and women’s education, and the image of the “new woman” became a symbol of the struggle against arranged marriage and patriarchy. 4 6 5

The war and the Shandong question

The Shandong question went back to 1898, when Germany leased Jiaozhou Bay and Qingdao for ninety-nine years. When the First World War broke out in 1914 Japan seized Qingdao, and in 1915 Yuan Shikai accepted thirteen of the Twenty-One Demands, in effect recognising Japan’s succession to the German rights; Britain and France also promised them to Japan. China declared war on Germany and Austria-Hungary on 14 August 1917, and some 140,000 Chinese labourers served the British and French. As one of the victors, China expected Shandong back. 9 10 5

But the Beijing government itself undermined that hope. Between January 1917 and September 1918 the Terauchi Masatake cabinet of Japan, through its envoy Nishihara Kamezō, made Duan Qirui eight loans totalling 145 million yen, in return for confirmation of Japan’s claims to the Jiaozhou Bay leasehold and the Shandong railways. When Duan’s Sino-Japanese Joint Defence Agreement of 1918 was leaked to the press, students staged protests that served as a rehearsal for May Fourth. Late that year Duan secretly reaffirmed the transfer of Shandong and accepted payments from Japan. 11 5 9

At the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 China’s delegation, led by Lu Zhengxiang, asked for the abolition of foreign privileges such as extraterritoriality, the cancellation of the Twenty-One Demands and the return of Shandong. The young diplomat Wellington Koo argued that China could no more give up Shandong, the birthplace of Confucius, than Christians could concede Jerusalem, and Liang Qichao led a private delegation that sent reports home. Woodrow Wilson spoke of self-determination but could not prevail against Clemenceau and Lloyd George, bent on punishing Germany. On 30 April the powers decided to give the German rights in Shandong to Japan, and this became Article 156 of the Treaty of Versailles. 5 9 12 13 14

4 May 1919 and Shanghai in June

When the news arrived, more than a thousand Peking University students met in the law school hall on the night of 3 May and resolved to demonstrate at Tiananmen the next day. On the morning of 4 May student representatives of thirteen Beijing colleges adopted five resolutions, including opposition to the transfer of Shandong, a Beijing student union and an afternoon demonstration, and at about one o’clock more than 3,000 students (English accounts say over 4,000) gathered before Tiananmen. They shouted “Struggle for sovereignty abroad, get rid of the national traitors at home”, “Do away with the Twenty-One Demands” and “Give us back Qingdao”. That March the March First Movement in Korea had struck Chinese intellectuals as an example of mass resistance to imperialism. 14 5 15

Unable to enter the Legation Quarter at Dongjiaominxiang, the angry marchers went at about half past four to the house at Zhaojialou of Cao Rulin, the minister of communications who had signed the Twenty-One Demands treaty in 1915. Climbing the walls, they beat Zhang Zongxiang, minister to Japan, whom they found in the house, and set it on fire, the “burning of Zhaojialou”. Police and gendarmes arrived and arrested 32 students. Li Dazhao’s library office served as a planning centre for the student movement, and the Peking University student Zhang Guotao became one of its best-known leaders. 14 16 2 17

On 5 May Beijing’s students went on strike, and on the 6th students gathered at Fudan University in Shanghai. President Xu Shichang ordered order restored, but the movement spread nationwide. When Beijing police arrested nearly a thousand students making street speeches on 3 June, the merchants and workers of Shanghai rose: shops closed and factory and dock workers struck, shifting the movement’s centre from Beijing to Shanghai and its main force from students to workers. The Shanghai general strike nearly paralysed the economy, and merchants threatened to withhold taxes if the government did not give way. Chen Duxiu was arrested on 11 June while distributing leaflets and held for 83 days. 5 14 3

The government gave way. Cao Rulin, Zhang Zongxiang and Lu Zongyu were dismissed, the Shanghai general strike ended on 12 June, and on 28 June China’s delegation in Paris refused to sign the Treaty of Versailles. Since Japan still held Shandong the victory was symbolic, but the working class had entered the political arena for the first time. The movement spread to the provinces. In Changsha Mao Zedong founded the Hunanese Student Association with He Shuheng, Deng Zhongxia and others and in July launched the weekly Xiang River Review, calling for a “Great Union of the Popular Masses” and mocking Wilson as “an ant on a hot skillet”. In Tianjin Zhou Enlai ran the student union bulletin and in September founded the Awakening Society. 14 5 18 19

“Problems and isms”: the reception of Marxism

The first Chinese intellectual to welcome the Russian Revolution was Li Dazhao. While Chen Duxiu and others hailed the February Revolution of 1917 as a victory for the Allies, Li distrusted Western democracy, and in July 1918 he praised the October Revolution as a new humanism and internationalism surpassing the narrow patriotism of the French Revolution. In “The Victory of Bolshevism” of November 1918 he declared the Russian Revolution the beginning of a world class war and the end of the age of capitalism and imperialism. Late that year he set up the first Marxist study group at Peking University, meeting in his library office, soon called the “Red Chamber”; his library assistant in the winter of 1918–19 was Mao Zedong. 2 18 20

In his February 1919 series “Youth and the Villages” Li argued that China was a rural nation whose labouring class was mostly peasants, so that unless they were liberated the whole nation could not be, and called on young urban intellectuals to go to the countryside. Modelled on the Russian Narodniks, this appeal planted the idea of the peasantry as the main force of revolution. The special issue of New Youth on Marxism, published on 1 May, three days before May Fourth, was edited by Li, and his long article “My Marxist Views” was the most systematic introduction to Marxism yet published in Chinese. He was drawn to the theory of class struggle but had reservations about the economic determinism of historical materialism. 2 4

After May Fourth the movement split. In July 1919 Hu Shih wrote in the Weekly Review urging “more study of problems, less talk of isms”: every ism was only a hypothesis, never a dogma, and social problems had to be solved one by one, gradually. Li Dazhao replied that individual problems could not be solved without a “fundamental solution” of the whole political structure, and that a mass movement needed an “ism” to give it common direction. Hu, a follower of Dewey’s pragmatism, took the road of reform; Li and Chen Duxiu, that of revolution. That men who began in the same magazine went in opposite directions sums up the character of the period. 2 8 1

Russia presented a different face from the powers. On 25 July 1919 Lev Karakhan, deputy people’s commissar for foreign affairs of Soviet Russia, signed a declaration renouncing the territories, extraterritoriality, concessions and Russian share of the Boxer indemnity that tsarist Russia had taken from China. Becoming known in China in late March and early April 1920, the Karakhan Manifesto was received with enthusiasm and stood in stark contrast to the powers at Versailles. The text the Chinese government received did promise the free return of the Chinese Eastern Railway, but the Soviets later said it was not the official text, a dispute that ran for years. That year Chen Duxiu turned to Marxism, and Mao Zedong, meeting him in Shanghai, was deeply impressed. 21 22 3 18

Voitinsky and the communist groups

In 1920 Soviet Russia set up the Far Eastern Bureau of the Comintern in Siberia, which sent the 27-year-old Grigori Voitinsky to China. Having lived as a worker in the United States and Canada, joined the Socialist Party of America and returned in 1918 to become a Bolshevik, he arrived in Beijing in April 1920 posing as a journalist, met Li Dazhao, and through Li met Chen Duxiu in Shanghai, with Yang Mingzhai as interpreter and guide. Voitinsky’s group set up the Comintern’s East Asia Secretariat in the office of a Russian-run Shanghai newspaper and funded the translation and distribution of propaganda such as The Communist Manifesto. 23 2

In June 1920 Chen Duxiu decided at his home to build a party organisation, and in August the Shanghai communist group was formally founded. Its official name was simply “Communist Party”; Chen was secretary, and its members included Li Hanjun, Li Da, Chen Wangdao, Shao Lizi, Shen Yanbing, Zhou Fohai and Yang Mingzhai. The Kuomintang’s Dai Jitao joined at first and then withdrew. From its 1 September issue New Youth openly supported communism, and in November appeared the clandestine monthly The Communist and a first manifesto declaring the aim of organising a proletarian party to fight the capitalists and seize power. The group published the workers’ weekly Labour World, opened night schools in the mill districts, founded the Socialist Youth League in August and a foreign-language school that sent young people such as Liu Shaoqi and Ren Bishi to the Communist University of the Toilers of the East in Moscow. 24 4 25 23

In September or October 1920 Li Dazhao founded a parallel group in Beijing with Deng Zhongxia, Zhang Guotao and others, giving rise to the phrase “Chen in the south, Li in the north”. Groups were formed in Changsha by Mao Zedong and He Shuheng, in Wuhan by Dong Biwu and Chen Tanqiu, in Jinan by Wang Jinmei and Deng Enming, and in Guangzhou, with circles among the students in Japan and the work-study students in France. Several thousand student-workers went to France after 1919; Cai Hesen’s letters from there did much to turn Mao towards the Bolshevik road, and Zhou Enlai, Li Lisan and Deng Xiaoping awoke to politics there. Qu Qiubai went to Moscow as correspondent of the Beijing Morning News and reported on post-revolutionary Russia. 2 26 27 28 29 30 31

How large Voitinsky’s role was remains debated. Some see him as the “chief architect” of the party; the CCP’s own Institute of Party History and Literature holds that Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu had discussed founding a party before he came. Yoshihiro Ishikawa argues that one cannot say with certainty that the two discussed a nationwide party before his arrival, and Yitzhak Shichor notes that the idea was already circulating but no action had been taken until he arrived. As Ishikawa says, the question touches on whether the party was a product of Soviet “revolutionary export” or of the Chinese revolutionary movement itself. Voitinsky himself left China in early 1921. 23

July 1921: the First National Congress

In early June 1921 Vladimir Neumann, known as Nikolsky, sent by the Comintern’s Far Eastern Bureau in Irkutsk, and the Dutchman Henk Sneevliet, known as Maring, whom Lenin had sent, arrived in Shanghai. Maring had guided the formation of the communist party in Indonesia and had been elected to the Comintern Executive at its Second Congress in 1920. The two urged Li Da, who was running the Shanghai group, to convene a national congress, and Li Da and Li Hanjun wrote to the groups asking each to send two delegates. The Comintern financed the congress and the party’s first months. 27 32 33 24

The congress opened on 23 July in a shikumen house in the French Concession, with 13 delegates for a party of 57 members: Li Da and Li Hanjun for Shanghai, Zhang Guotao and Liu Renjing for Beijing, Mao Zedong and He Shuheng for Changsha, Dong Biwu and Chen Tanqiu for Wuhan, Wang Jinmei and Deng Enming for Jinan, Chen Gongbo for Guangzhou, Zhou Fohai for the students in Japan, and Bao Huiseng as Chen Duxiu’s personal representative. Neither Chen Duxiu nor Li Dazhao, the party’s founders, attended. Zhang Guotao presided, and Nikolsky spoke on the aims of the Red International of Labour Unions. When the French Concession police searched the meeting place on the night of 30 July, the delegates moved to Jiaxing in Zhejiang and finished the congress on a tourist boat hired on South Lake. 27 17 32 20

The congress adopted the First Programme of the Communist Party of China, which named the party and set out its aims: to overthrow the power of the capitalist class, to eradicate capitalism and private ownership, and to join the Comintern. It elected Chen Duxiu, in absentia, as secretary, Zhang Guotao as director of organisation and Li Da as director of propaganda. The original text of the programme was long lost and was identified only in a Russian translation among the Comintern papers the Soviet Union handed over in 1957. The dates long remained uncertain: the opening was officially fixed as 23 July only in 1981, and six dates between 31 July and 5 August are still proposed for the close. The party has kept 1 July as its founding anniversary. 27 34 20

Of the thirteen delegates, only Mao Zedong and Dong Biwu stood at the proclamation of the People’s Republic in 1949. Seven left the party, one died of illness and three died for the cause. Among those who left, Chen Gongbo and Zhou Fohai later passed through the Kuomintang to become leading figures of the collaborationist regime at Nanjing, and Zhang Guotao left the party in 1938. Li Dazhao, at the party’s core, was executed by Zhang Zuolin in 1927, and Chen Duxiu, expelled in 1929, went on to lead China’s Trotskyist movement. The list sums up the road taken by a party that began with some fifty members. 27 35 2 20 17 3 36 37

The labour movement and the lesson of 7 February

Soon after its founding, on 11 August 1921, the party set up the China Labour Union Secretariat in Shanghai, its first body for leading the labour movement, with Zhang Guotao as director and Labour Weekly as its organ. In October the Secretariat led a strike of more than 9,000 workers at the British-American Tobacco factories and opened branches in Beijing (Deng Zhongxia), Wuhan, Changsha (Mao Zedong), Guangzhou and Jinan. On 1 May 1922 it convened the First National Labour Congress in Guangzhou, which elected Deng Zhongxia secretary. In the thirteen months from January 1922 to February 1923 more than a hundred strikes large and small broke out with over 300,000 participants, the period the party calls the first upsurge of the labour movement. 38 17 26 39

The first big battle, the Hong Kong seamen’s strike of 12 January 1922, was not led by the Communists. The Chinese Seamen’s Union that led it had been named by Sun Yat-sen, its president and vice-president were Kuomintang members, and its leader Su Zhaozheng, a former Tongmenghui member, joined the Communist Party only in 1925. More than 30,000 joined the strike, and after the Hong Kong government outlawed the union and, on 3 March, opened fire on strikers walking back to Guangzhou, the shipowners gave way after 52 days with rises of 15 to 30 per cent. The Secretariat supported the strike, and Maring, then in Guangdong, was deeply impressed to see the Kuomintang leading a labour movement. 40 41 42 43

The party’s own victory came at the Anyuan coal mines and railway in Jiangxi in September 1922. Soon after the founding Li Lisan and Mao Zedong visited Anyuan, and Li stayed to build a party branch and a workers’ club. When the mine authorities withheld back pay and tried to dissolve the club, some 17,000 miners and railwaymen struck from the night of 12 September, issuing seventeen demands on the 14th, Li Lisan as commander-in-chief and Liu Shaoqi as the club’s plenipotentiary. Holding out under the slogan “We were beasts of burden before; now we will be human”, they won a thirteen-point agreement on the 18th. The club was dissolved by force in 1925, but its workers later joined the Northern Expedition and the Autumn Harvest Uprising. 44 30

In February 1923 the workers of the Beijing–Hankou railway tried to found a general union at Zhengzhou. When the Zhili warlord Wu Peifu, at the railway director’s request, banned the meeting, the union called a line-wide strike on 4 February. On 7 February the troops of Wu Peifu and Cao Kun attacked the workers at Jiang’an in Hankou and elsewhere, killing Lin Xiangqian, chairman of the Jiang’an branch, and Shi Yang, the union’s legal adviser. The dead are given as 35 (English accounts following Wu’s side) to 52 (the “fifty-two martyrs” of Chinese accounts), with more than a hundred wounded and thousands dismissed, and the workers returned on the 9th. The February Seventh Massacre destroyed the party’s labour base in north China and taught that workers alone could not defeat the warlords; afterwards Li Dazhao turned to the peasantry. 39 45 2

The road to the united front

The Second Congress, held in July 1922 in the Shanghai International Settlement with twelve representatives for 195 members, adopted the party’s first constitution. It accepted the Comintern’s Twenty-one Conditions, making the party the Comintern’s Chinese section, and its resolution on a “democratic united front” allowed alliance with democrats such as the Kuomintang while stressing the party’s independence. Chen Duxiu was elected general secretary, and Zhang Guotao, Cai Hesen, Deng Zhongxia and Gao Junyu members of the Central Executive Committee; it decided to publish The Guide Weekly, edited by Cai Hesen, the first openly published organ of the Central Committee. Xiang Jingyu was put in charge of the women’s movement. 46 29

The Comintern’s line had been set at its Second Congress in 1920. Reporting for the commission on the national and colonial questions, Lenin said that any national movement in backward countries could only be bourgeois-democratic, and that communists should call it a “national-revolutionary movement” and support it. Maring, who sat on that colonial commission, met Sun Yat-sen at Guilin in December 1921 and, after seeing the Kuomintang-led seamen’s strike, became convinced that communists should join the Kuomintang. At a special meeting at West Lake in Hangzhou on 29–30 August 1922 he conveyed the Comintern’s wish that party members join the Kuomintang as individuals. Chen Duxiu recalled that he, Li Dazhao, Zhang Guotao, Cai Hesen and Gao Junyu all opposed it, but had to accept when Maring asked whether they would obey Comintern discipline. Zhang Tailei interpreted. 47 43 33

The alliance’s most ardent supporter was Li Dazhao, who in the autumn of 1922 became the first party member to join the Kuomintang as an individual. In 1923 Sun Yat-sen issued a joint declaration with the Soviet envoy Adolph Joffe, agreeing that the Soviet system did not suit China in exchange for Soviet aid. The Third Congress, held in Guangzhou in June 1923 with about forty delegates for 420 members, resolved that party members would join the Kuomintang as individuals while preserving and expanding the party’s own organisation. Mao Zedong stressed the peasant question there and became secretary of the Central Bureau. At its close the delegates sang “The Internationale” before the tomb of the Huanghuagang martyrs. The later course of the alliance belongs to the event on the First United Front. 2 48 49

Assessment: the two lineages of May Fourth

May Fourth became an event claimed by almost every later Chinese political force. Writing for its twentieth anniversary in 1939, Mao Zedong called the May Fourth Movement “a new stage in China’s bourgeois-democratic revolution against imperialism and feudalism”, which went a step beyond the 1911 Revolution in that “a powerful camp” of “the working class, the student masses and the new national bourgeoisie” appeared. “On New Democracy” (1940) placed the period from May Fourth to the founding of the party as the first period of the new-democratic revolution. The People’s Republic marks 4 May as Youth Day and Taiwan as Literary Day. Chiang Kai-shek criticised the movement’s iconoclasm for corrupting the morals of youth, and his regime revived Confucianism through the New Life Movement. 50 51 5

Historians are divided too. The orthodox view saw the New Culture Movement as a revolutionary break with feudal thought and the seedbed of the party’s leaders. In recent decades, however, Chinese and foreign historians have argued that its changes had roots going back several generations to the late Qing reforms and were not a sharp break with tradition. Another view holds that the movement was an open space where liberalism, anarchism, pragmatism and Marxism coexisted, and that the anti-imperialist nationalism and party politics of the mid-1920s closed that plurality. Wang Gungwu notes that May Fourth was later identified as a forerunner of the Cultural Revolution, and Benjamin Schwartz called nationalism less a separate ideology than “a common disposition” of the May Fourth generation. 1 5

The numbers differ by source as well. The students who marched on 4 May are given as over 3,000 (Chinese accounts) to over 4,000 (English accounts), and those arrested on 3 June as nearly a thousand. The party’s membership at the founding congress is usually given as 57 but also as “some fifty”. The dead of 7 February number from 35 to 52. Even the congress opened on 23 July while the party celebrates 1 July. Such differences show that both May Fourth and the founding were rewritten in later politics. On 4 May 1989, too, some 100,000 students marched in Beijing to commemorate the seventieth anniversary. 14 5 27 34 39 45 52

What May Fourth left the socialist movement can be summed up in three points. First, the vernacular and “science and democracy” became the common language of the educated and gave them a means of reaching the masses. Second, the betrayal at Versailles greatly diminished the appeal of Western liberal democracy and made the Russian Revolution a new model; as Paul French puts it, the only victor of the Treaty of Versailles in China was communism. Third, Shanghai in June and the February Seventh Massacre showed both that the working class had entered politics and that its strength alone could not defeat the warlords and imperialism. It was from this experience that Li Dazhao sought an answer in the peasantry, and the Comintern in an alliance with the Kuomintang. 5 2 39