The First Chinese Revolution: Early Years of the Chinese Communist Party¶
Core Argument¶
Chapter Digest: The First Chinese Revolution: Early Years of the Chinese Communist Party¶
This chapter traces the social and economic conditions that made China ripe for revolution, and the early organisation of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Its core argument is that the extreme exploitation of the Chinese peasantry and the concentrated emergence of a new industrial working class created a revolutionary potential that only a Leninist party could harness, with decisive assistance from the Communist International.
The Chinese peasantry, the most rebellious on earth, lived under a unique and crushing system. Unlike Europe, China lacked a hereditary landed aristocracy; land was divided equally among sons, but the peasant faced a unified coalition of landlord, moneylender, state official, capitalist entrepreneur and international financier. Village government was dominated by landlords who collected taxes, administered justice, and enforced control through Confucian ideology and vigilante groups. Collective punishment was routine, and tax officials routinely embezzled the majority of monies collected; in Hupeh province in 1927/28, 77% of tax revenue was stolen. By the 1920s, 80% of the population were land-hungry peasants. Ten percent of the agricultural population owned two-thirds of the land. Tenants paid 25–66% of their crop as rent; money-lending rates of 40–80% were typical. Landless peasants, about one-third of the total, lived in semi-slavery. The subjugation of women was essential to this social pyramid; rich peasants used large families to control landholdings, and Confucianism decreed women’s lifelong subordination. The anarchist He Yin Zheh, co-founder of the feminist journal Natural Justice, claimed that feminism brought Marxism to China, not the reverse.
The Opium Wars forced open Chinese ports, imposed indemnities paid by taxing the peasantry, and destroyed village self-sufficiency through cheap British imports. The Taiping Rebellion (1849–1863) threatened the Qing dynasty but was suppressed with British military support. Land seizure for non-payment of taxes systematically drove peasants into violent uprisings, which sometimes overthrew dynasties but never restructured the social order—a phenomenon Marx described as an unchanging social infrastructure with only dynastic change.
Industrially, China was contradictory. By 1925 there were only 12,300 km of track, mostly in the east, used militarily or by imperialists. Imported goods pauperised rural populations, creating cheap labour. Cities grew rapidly: Shanghai reached 1.9 million by 1919. The new working class comprised peasant immigrants; industrialisation offered independence from the family unit, undermining patriarchal authority and fostering receptiveness to revolutionary ideas. World War I accelerated Chinese-owned factory development. By 1922 there were two million industrial workers, plus two million miners, railway workers and seamen, and ten million handicraft workers. In Shanghai, 57 factories employed 500–1,000 workers each, and 49 employed over 1,000. Nearly half of Shanghai’s workers were women, treated worse than men. The national bourgeoisie collided with entrenched foreign interests, which owned nearly all railways, over half of shipping, and almost all merchant shipping. The more entrepreneurial sections of the national bourgeoisie were prepared to support anti-imperialist revolutionary parties. Although a small proportion of the population, the working class’s concentration in cities and its ability to offer peasants a land solution made it decisive.
The May 4th Movement (1919) began when 5,000 Beijing students attacked ministers complicit with Japan, after documents showed Versailles decisions rested on prior Sino-Japanese deals. Student strikes spread nationwide. Over 150,000 Chinese workers who had laboured for Allied armies returned radicalised and with trade union experience; in early June they declared a Shanghai strike involving some 100,000 industrial workers, forcing the Beijing Government to concede. This marked Chinese labour’s emergence as an independent political force. The movement’s failure polarised it: radicals led by Chen Duxiu turned to Leninism and Marxism. Impressed by the Russian Revolution, Chen and Li Dazhao organised Marxist study groups. In March 1920, Comintern’s Voitinsky met Li, then Chen in Shanghai; by May 1920 he had persuaded Chen to found the CCP, drafted its programme, established a provisional Central Committee and the first cell in Shanghai