From Friend to Comrade: The Founding of the Chinese Communist Party, 1920-1927 - Hardcover

Van De Ven, Hans J.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520072715 ISBN 13: 9780520072718

Publisher: University of California Press, 1992

Synopsis

Scholars have long held that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was a centralized organization from its founding in 1921. In a departure from that view, From Friend to Comrade demonstrates how the CCP began as a group of study societies, only evolving into a mass Marxist-Leninist party by 1927.

Hans J. van de Ven's study is based on party documents of the 1920s that have only recently become available, as well as the writings of a wide range of Chinese communists. He analyzes the party's difficulty in building a cohesive organization firmly rooted in Chinese society. While past scholarship has emphasized the influence of Soviet communism on the CCP, van de Ven stresses the thinking and actions of Chinese communists themselves, placing their struggle in the context of China's political history and highly complex society.

About this title

About the Author

Hans J. van de Ven is Lecturer in Chinese Studies and Fellow of St. Catherine's College, University of Cambridge.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

From Friend to Comrade: The Founding of the Chinese Communist Party, 1920-1927

By Hans J. Van De Ven

University of California Press

Copyright © 1992 Hans J. Van De Ven
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0520072715


Introduction

Chinese communists have attracted scholarly attention in the past. Why, then, this study? In recent years, historians and archivists in the People's Republic of China (PRC) have produced a mountain of new primary sources on the early history of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). What drew me to this mountain was the thought that a study of the organizational development of the early CCP had not yet been written. Past scholars have produced biographies of important Chinese communists, and they have examined ideological developments, CCP-Comintern relations, and the CCP's early peasant and labor movements. But none have put the CCP at the center of the story.

Previous writers have argued that Chinese communists established a true Leninist party with a centralized organization firmly asserting an ideology within a short time after the formal establishment of the CCP at its First Congress in July 1921. This study argues that this was a much more complicated process, which lasted until 1927 and involved deep changes in the norms of behavior and styles of action of CCP members. It was only in 1927 that they presented and treated the CCP as more than the sum of their total—as the Party. At the time of its formal inauguration, few CCP members had a firm concept of their party or what they wished it to stand for. Organizationally, it was a loose confederation of Marxist-Leninist study societies. In subsequent years, Chinese communists struggled to give meaning to the CCP while making it the framework of their political activities. They frequently collided over such issues as the distribution of authority, the correct attitude of individual members to the CCP, and the structure of their relationship with Chinese society. The CCP as a larger-than-life organization with its own culture was not a reality before 1927.

The first chapter places the spread of communism in China in the context of China's political crisis. While the 1911 Revolution had overthrown the dynastic order, the growing assertion of warlordism afterward and the spreading abuse of political power produced a situation in which many of China's educated elite expressed anger and frustration with what they saw as the brutalization of politics. The first chapter discusses the growing alienation from the Republic of those early CCP members for whom sufficient material exists to study the development of their thinking prior to the establishment of the CCP. Marxism-Leninism, with its depiction of politics as dominated by an exploitative elite, fitted their perception of politics as debased by elite profiteering, and they couched their decision to seek the ouster of political institutions of the Republic in its terms.

One of the principal attractions of Marxism-Leninism to Chinese communists was that it seemed to offer effective ways to confront China's political crisis. Most had been involved in study societies, which in the past had been used by elites as vehicles to promote political causes in the dynastic bureaucracy. Study societies had blossomed among China's new student population after the New Culture movement began in 1915. However, as the grip of warlordism on political institutions tightened and the republican political order showed itself impervious to calls for reform, debates in study societies broke out about the effectiveness of the societies to promote an honorable politics. The discussions dealt with such issues as whether society members should seek change by promoting new ideas or by seizing political power, whether participation in a political party would corrupt their moral integrity, and whether it was appropriate to combine on the basis of one ideology. In these discussions and in their writings of this time, future members of the CCP began to use Marxism-Leninism to formulate new political norms and advance new principles of political organization and action. It was as a result of this ferment that the first communist organizations were established.

The second chapter describes the activities of these organizations, which I call cells. The chapter discusses their formation and activities up to the First CCP Congress of July 1921. It suggests that the CCP was not the result of a central initiative but that in various places in China and abroad, Chinese established communist cells at more or less the same time, in some cases in ignorance of activities elsewhere. It also seeks to demonstrate that in general Chinese communists lacked a concept of a centralized leadership possessing ideological authority, or of a party having an exclusive claim on their time and their attachments. The chapter denies the centrality of Shanghai in the early CCP and emphasizes the relative autonomy of communist cells as well as the differences between them.

The CCP that emerged after the First Congress was fragmented. While the CCP's regional branches proved cohesive, its members looked toward CCP institutions and congresses in much the same way they had viewed those of study societies. Institutions lacked the power to enforce their decisions, and congresses were considered occasions for discussion and debate rather than mechanisms for drawing up plans of action and securing partywide implementation. Diversity of opinion existed about a range of topics, including the internal organization of the CCP and even whether it should develop a labor movement without procedures or shared norms providing ways to arrive at a settlement of the resulting conflicts. In 1923 central leadership collapsed completely in the CCP, in part as a result of the lack of organizational cohesion. At the same time, warlords and rural elites destroyed the CCP's labor and peasant movements, mostly because of the naiveté of CCP members about power relations in Chinese society and their vain confidence that workers and peasants would immediately grant them their allegiance. Chapter 3 first describes how the CCP nearly died a premature death between 1921 and 1923. It then analyzes how in the wake of these difficulties CCP members for the first time explored actively the organizational structures and techniques that Marxism-Leninism had to offer.

It was the May Thirtieth movement of 1925 that breathed life into the CCP. In 1925 CCP membership was still slightly under 1,000; two years later, it had grown to more than 57,000. CCP members had led huge mass movements, both in the city and in the countryside: the party had broken out of its social and urban isolation, its members came from all social strata, and it possessed an organizational presence in most urban centers and in much of the countryside of southern China. The same men who had still acted as modern Confuciuses in the early years of the CCP now could be found serving on committees with peasants and workers. They infiltrated gangs and Triads, and their long theoretical essays had made way for agitprop. They procured arms and instigated riots, and in public they all asserted one ideological line. It was a new world.

The fourth chapter seeks to demonstrate how CCP-society relations—and CCP conceptions of these—developed after the May Thirtieth movement. The movement was an open invitation for CCP members to create a "mass party," a party well embedded in Chinese society. To create a mass base, the CCP's challenge was to loosen Chinese from their existing social framework and tie them to CCP institutions. This was not an easy task. The CCP's first recruitment drives led to the incorporation into the CCP of gangs, bandit groups, Triads, and so on, which at times used the CCP for their own purposes rather than the other way around. It was

because of problems like this that the CCP was unable to build a firm base and lost its struggle for power with the Nationalists, the Kuomintang (KMT), in 1927. Yet new approaches toward forming mass organizations were formulated, many of which became basic elements of the formula that in the end brought victory on mainland China to the CCP.

Chapter 5 examines the changes that took place in the 1925–1927 period within the CCP. The idea that the CCP was made up of friends who were equals in all respects made way for a central leadership that claimed it represented the correct party line and therefore possessed the right to direct CCP activities and give instructions to the party's members, who were, it was asserted, to accept its authority in all areas of life, including the intellectual realm. With CCP members possessing disparate social and cultural origins, the CCP needed to develop a new style of operation that was intelligible to all and also underscored their sense of distinctness. They did so on the basis of Marxism-Leninism, which became the fundament of a new mode of communication employed by CCP members on the one hand to cooperate in joint political activities and on the other to formulate new values and norms. They also employed the new mode of communication to promote their own ideas and represent their causes within their party. The August 7 emergency conference of 1927 was the first time all this came together. This is why this study ends with that event.

I do not mean to argue that Chinese communists ceased to debate the purpose and organization of the CCP after that date. The topics with which early CCP members struggled have emerged as issues of internal conflict again and again in the history of the CCP, as they did for example during the Long March, in Yan'an, during the Cultural Revolution, and in recent years. Not only has the CCP changed structurally over time, but at any given moment, different groups of members have attached their own meaning to it. However, it was in 1927 that the CCP became a centralized mass party, with its documents and its leading members asserting at least in public that the CCP was to be regarded as the source of all legitimate decisions and the institution that would deliver the future.

It is also not my belief that Chinese communists shed all traditional political norms and styles of behavior to acquire gradually the outlook, skills, and habits of real Leninists. Many fundamental changes had taken place in traditional Chinese politics before the establishment of the CCP. CCP members, in addition, produced their own organization, different from that of communists in the Soviet Union. Not all traditional norms or allegiances lost their value to Chinese communists, even if they were expressed in a different way.

This is an effort to analyze the founding of the CCP in terms of the

Chinese world. A background question that has constantly been on my mind is how one must understand the political transformation that occurred between the late Qing and the middle of this century. It is clear that a metamorphosis took place: the dynastic system made way for mass political parties asserting ideologies, and rebellions became mass movements involving students, urban workers, professionals, and the peasantry. Yet many aspects of this transformation have remained unexplored, and so far we have not moved beyond a choppy historiography of the period, with events following upon one another in a seemingly unconnected fashion. Of course, much that happened in this confused period was unconnected, and exigency and accident were important, something this book underscores many times. Nonetheless, the changes have been profound. By focusing on how one group structured its political activities during what seems an especially turbulent period, it is hoped that this study contributes to a better understanding of China's political metamorphosis.

The earliest generation of scholars to examine Chinese communism seriously did so in the context of the issue that framed much other research at the time—the intellectual and cultural continuity between traditional and modern China.1 In Joseph Levenson's view, Marxist historicism provided Chinese communists with a way to combine an emotional attachment to their heritage and a rational commitment to modernity. It enabled them, he argued, to view their heritage as something of the past, but of their past.2 Benjamin Schwartz argued that the relation with the West rather than Chinese tradition was uppermost in the minds of Chinese communists. According to Schwartz, Chinese communists found in Marxism-Leninism a theory that was Western yet critical of the West and spoke to their feelings of national inferiority. Rejecting the tradition-modernity dichotomy, Schwartz showed that they used Marxism-Leninism to draw insights into their own situation and that they developed it in the process.3

The issues that Schwartz and Levenson raised have continued to stimulate research on Chinese communism,4 and in several aspects this book continues to deal with them. However, I differ from Schwartz and Levenson in that I am not interested only in issues of cultural identity and continuity but also in those involved in the evolution of the structure and the social background of political action, as well as in the conduct of conflict. In addition, my understanding of ideology is different from theirs.

It borrows from Clifford Geertz's definition. Geertz has written that ideologies are "schematic images of social order" that come into play when "a political system begins to free itself from the immediate governance of received tradition."5 According to Geertz, received tradition—the reli-

gion, philosophy, and conventions of the past—loses out when it fails to provide ways of articulating new phenomena. In his view, ideology illuminates an unprecedented historical situation and functions as a road map in terrain that is emotionally and intellectually unfamiliar.6 Marxism-Leninism, chapter 1 will argue, functioned in part as such a road map for Chinese communists.

Yet Chinese communists looked at this road map with their own considerations and objectives in mind. Following Philip Kuhn's approach to ideology in his study of the Taiping Rebellion of the mid-nineteenth century, I see Marxism-Leninism "fitting" the agenda of Chinese communists but also conflicting with norms of behavior and styles of operation to which they had adhered previously.7 Both the fits and the contradictions sparked Chinese communists to develop new norms, institutions, and forms of communication and argument. This is not to argue that Marxism-Leninism and traditional Chinese forms of political action were exclusive entities. Communists were concerned with a number of issues with which political thinkers in China's past also struggled, and their behavior continued to display some traditional norms.

Perhaps the most significant way my view of ideology differs from earlier scholars' is that I stress its importance as a mode of communication and a legitimation device. Marxism-Leninism is a theory of history, politics, and economics, providing categories of analysis and policy prescriptions; at the same time the texts of Marxism-Leninism are a rich storehouse of symbols, mythologies, values, and norms. Marxism-Leninism shaped the thinking of CCP members, but they also marshaled its categories, values, and myths to articulate their thoughts, justify their actions, build coalitions, maintain their organization, and mislead others. This is why they could use it as a mode of communication. They also exploited Marxism-Leninism to maintain their organization, using it to sanction leadership selection and the exercise of authority within the CCP.

A second group of studies approached the history of the CCP from the perspective of social and political revolution, focusing on popular, especially peasant movements. The central issue in these studies—in which "revolution" was both a model of historical change derived from the social sciences and an explanatory metaphor—was why and how the CCP could mobilize the Chinese peasantry and so rise to power.8 In an early attempt to provide an answer to these questions, Chalmers Johnson argued that the CCP rose to power not on the basis of its social and economic programs but by associating itself with a peasant nationalism evoked by Japanese rule.9

A number of authors based their interpretations of the relationship

between the CCP and China's peasantry on the concept of the moral economy.10 Ralph Thaxton, for instance, made the argument that economic dislocation caused by Western economic intrusion ruptured ties of reciprocity and fairness between landlord and tenant, leading landlords to exploit peasants to ever greater degrees during the Republic.11 The CCP, according to Thaxton, mobilized the peasants by promising to satisfy their demand for justice against landlords.12 In reaction to this view as well as that of Johnson, Ch'en Yung-fa has sought to put the revolutionary back into the story. In Making Revolution , he examined how local cadres both attempted to mobilize peasants by means of revolutionary programs and adjusted their policies to reduce their threat to rural elites.13

These studies and the questions they ask have also influenced this work, especially the fourth chapter. The revolution model, however, has tended to direct attention toward the relationship between the CCP and China's peasantry, assuming the CCP as a known factor. It has also tended to cast the changes that were taking place as essentially the ouster of a social class, the propertied elites, by a mass movement led by the CCP. While that is part of the story, it seems to me that China's revolution has run far deeper, involving nearly all aspects of Chinese life and bringing into question the most basic values and established forms of organization. Certainly the equation of the growth of the CCP with the maturation of that revolution seems a simplification. The idea that there was one revolution stretching back over a century and a half also suggests a cohesion among events that has not been spelled out.

Continues...

Excerpted from From Friend to Comrade: The Founding of the Chinese Communist Party, 1920-1927by Hans J. Van De Ven Copyright © 1992 by Hans J. Van De Ven. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520072715
• ISBN 13: 9780520072718
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384