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Revolution and Civil War, episode 5

A Party on a Boat

In 1920 the northern generals fight a short war that brings down Duan Qirui's faction, and in Changsha Mao Zedong campaigns for a self-governing Hunan until the province's generals crush the movement. The episode follows Mao and Chen Duxiu, now in Shanghai, as Soviet Russia offers to give up the tsars' privileges in China, a Comintern agent arrives to organise study groups, and in July 1921 a handful of delegates found the Chinese Communist Party, finishing their congress on a boat after the police raid it, and asks why young Chinese turned to Moscow. It leans on scholars, with Chinese public voices on the war and a little from the British philosopher Bertrand Russell, who lectured in China in 1920 and 1921.

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Beyond the map: Moscow

Map drawn by Then and There on Natural Earth's public domain coastlines, rivers and lakes

Transcript

Anfu Club Wu Peifu Into Beijing Beijing Baoding Wu Peifu and the Zhili clique Duan Qirui and the Anfu Club
The Zhili Anhui War, 1920-07. Map drawn by Then and There from the episode's sources, on Natural Earth's public domain coastlines and rivers
Duan Qirui
Duan Qirui. Unknown photographer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Last time, some three thousand students gathered at the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Beijing and took to the streets, demanding that China's negotiators at Versailles reject any treaty that did not give Shandong back to China. They broke into the house of the official they blamed for the deals with Japan, smashed the furniture, and set the place on fire. When the government filled its jails with more than a thousand students, Shanghai shut down in a strike of classes, work and markets, and the president was forced to sack the three officials the students called traitors. And China's delegates at Paris refused to sign the treaty. Two of our people came out of that summer changed. Chen Duxiu, arrested for handing out a leaflet he had written on the Shandong question, spent eighty three days in prison. And a young man from Hunan named Mao Zedong started a student magazine there, and announced that a vast and furious tide of new thought was already surging along both banks of the Xiang River. This time, the men who made the deals with Japan pay for them, in a war that hardly gets fought. And the young people of May Fourth go looking for something to believe in, and find it in Moscow. So let's start at the top, or at least with the man who sat just behind the top. His name was Duan Qirui. He was a general of the northern army, the modern force built up in the last years of the empire, and since the death of Yuan Shikai, the republic's first strongman president, in 1916, he had been the hardest man in Beijing. Presidents came and went. Duan was premier, then not premier, then premier again, and through all of it he held what mattered most in Beijing, which was the army. He expected little good from parliaments. When parliament came back, he told the American minister that he saw no virtue in this curious modern method of governing through talk, though he was willing to give it a fair trial. The fair trial did not last long. In 1917 he pushed for China to enter the First World War on the Allied side. His real idea, his enemies said, was to use the war to get money out of Japan, and out of America too. The money came, mostly from Japan. Over the next few years his governments took loans from Tokyo that came to 145 million yen, and only five million of that was ever paid back. In return Duan gave Japan important concessions. And the money let him tighten his grip on parliament and the government, and build up his forces against the southern generals and Sun Yat-sen. Japan, he once told the same American minister, had promised him its support so long as he followed a strong policy. And a strong policy, for Duan, meant crushing the south by force. Think about what that looked like from the street. The army Duan built with Japanese money had been raised in the name of the war against Germany. It never went anywhere near Europe. Instead its men were meant for frontier defence, against the Russian Bolsheviks threatening the north western frontiers. The man who commanded that army, and who ran most of Duan's politics for him, was a younger general named Xu Shuzheng. People called him Little Xu. In late 1919 Little Xu marched troops north into Outer Mongolia, and made its rulers give up the self rule they had won when the empire fell. Duan's political machine was a club named after the lane in Beijing where its members met, the Anfu Club. In 1918 it won a majority in a new parliament, with a great deal of money changing hands, and that parliament chose a new president. To its critics, that parliament was a sham, and the club was in league with Japan's militarists. They said it had bartered away the nation's assets for a few coins, shut down liberal newspapers on the excuse that they preached Bolshevism, and jailed patriotic students and merchants on Japan's say so. And they said it had come within a whisker of signing away China at Versailles, until public opinion saved the day. So who would take on Duan? Not the students. They had no guns. After Yuan Shikai died, the northern army he had built split into three groups. Duan led one of them, which people called the Anhui clique, since Duan came from Anhui province. A clique, here, means a network of generals bound to a patron by loyalty, money and old school ties, more than by any idea. The second group was the Zhili clique, under Cao Kun and his best general, Wu Peifu. Zhili was the province that wrapped around Beijing, so this was the army on the capital's doorstep. And the third was the Fengtian clique in Manchuria, under Zhang Zuolin. Zhang had started out leading a band of irregulars in the wild country of the north east, and had made himself master of all three Manchurian provinces. This is what people mean when they talk about the warlords. Each of these men held a territory with his own army, taxed it to pay his soldiers, and treated the government in Beijing as a prize to be captured. Each general usually held a title from Beijing, most often as the military governor of a province. But the title only confirmed what his troops had already decided. And they changed sides with dizzying speed. Yesterday's ally was tomorrow's enemy, and many a battle was settled by money changing hands before a shot was fired. For two years, Wu Peifu and his division had been stationed far to the south, sent there to fight the southern armies that called themselves the defenders of the constitution. Wu was not a typical general. He had passed the lowest of the old civil service examinations before he went for a soldier, and he liked to be thought of as a scholar in uniform. In 1918 he stopped fighting the southerners, and the next year, during the student protests, he sent telegrams attacking the government's dealings with Japan, which made him something of a hero. And then, in dramatic style, he dashed back from the south. He became the one driving force that welded together everyone who hated the Anfu Club. Under his inspiration the officers and soldiers of the metropolitan province put out a bold manifesto, listing the crimes of the traitors and demanding that Little Xu be thrown out of office. On the morning of the twenty seventh of June 1920, a correspondent for a British newspaper in Shanghai turned up at Wu's headquarters in the city of Baoding, and had no trouble getting in to see him. He found the general frankly disappointing, at least if you were used to interviewing Chinese officials. Wu would not talk about the intricacies of politics. He made no predictions. He simply said what he wanted to do and how he meant to do it. And what he wanted was plain. He told the correspondent he was after Little Xu's scalp, and the Anfu Club had to go. Little Xu was Duan's man, and Duan was his protector. In the first days of July, under pressure from the generals, the president stripped Little Xu of his command. Duan took offence, and answered with a declaration of war. The fighting ran along the railways south of Beijing, the lines that carried every army in the north to and from the capital. And now Zhang Zuolin stood with Cao Kun and Wu Peifu against him. This is the war we call the Zhili Anhui War, after the two cliques. It is a grand name for something that lasted barely a week. At first Duan's side had much the greater military strength. The trouble was getting its soldiers to fight. One regiment of the frontier defence men simply refused to go to the front. They had been recruited to fight the Bolsheviks, not other Chinese, and they gave in only when their commander in chief begged them in person. A Chinese writer in Beijing set down what happened when the two armies met, as the news came in. "Arrived at the front, the men on both sides fraternized with one another just because one had a cousin on the other side and the other a relative on this side" He watched streams of soldiers coming back into the capital, apparently wounded and defeated, and he suspected most of them were cowards by choice. Why fight hard, he asked, for a side the whole country had decided was in the wrong? On the eighteenth of July, the combined forces of Cao Kun, Wu Peifu and Zhang Zuolin inflicted a decisive defeat on Duan's army near Baoding. After that, the fight simply went out of Duan's army. The British philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote that Duan's soldiers had "melted away when they came to understand the cause for which they were expected to fight." The Zhili men and their allies entered Beijing and changed the government almost without firing a shot. The leaders of the Anfu Club ran for the one place in Beijing their enemies could not follow them. They took refuge in the Japanese legation. Considering where their money had come from, there was a certain logic to that. The Anfu Club collapsed, Little Xu fell with it, and Duan Qirui went into retirement, a chastened man. He left for the foreign concessions of Tianjin, the port city a short train ride away, where the fallen men of the republic went to wait. He would be back in Beijing one day, but only as other generals' figurehead. The winners divided the spoils. Cao Kun and Wu Peifu took the lion's share of the north, Zhang Zuolin took his reward in Manchuria and in Beijing, and the new government was theirs. And the alliance between Zhang and Wu would not survive long. Two men like that do not share a capital for ever. And here is the part I want you to hold on to. Who actually brought Duan down? Not only Wu Peifu's division. The answer the philosopher heard on all sides was public opinion. Hatred of Japan, stirred up by the students in fiery speeches, had roused it, and it was by all accounts mainly responsible for the Anfu Club's fall in the summer of 1920. A year earlier those students had forced the government to sack three officials. Now the government that protected those officials was gone. But look at who did the actual work. It was a general with an army. The students could shame a government. It still took soldiers to change one. That lesson was not lost on the young people of May Fourth. For some of them, it was the beginning of a search for a different kind of power.

Mao Zedong
Mao Zedong. Chen Zhengqing (1917–1966), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Let's go south, to Hunan, and to Mao Zedong. Mao was twenty six in the summer of 1920, a tall young man from a farming family in the Hunan countryside, trained as a teacher in the provincial capital, Changsha. The year before had been hard on him. His magazine on the Xiang River had been shut down by the province's governor after only a few issues. His mother died that autumn, and his father the following winter. And in January 1920 he lost his old teacher Yang Changji, the man who had found him his library job in Beijing. He had also fallen in love with Yang's daughter, Yang Kaihui. They would marry before the end of 1920. In November 1919, something else had happened in Changsha that Mao could not let go. A young woman of the city, forced by her parents into a marriage she did not want, cut her throat with a razor inside the bridal sedan chair that was carrying her to her husband's family. Mao wrote article after article about her in the Changsha papers. He blamed her parents, the husband's family, and above all the society that had left her no other way out. It tells you how he was thinking. The problem was never just one cruel family, or one cruel governor. It was the whole system that made them. And Hunan had a cruel governor. He was a general named Zhang Jingyao, one of Duan Qirui's men, sent to hold Hunan for the north. His troops treated the province like conquered ground. Mao threw himself into the campaign to drive him out. In the winter of 1919 he went all the way to Beijing with a delegation of petitioners, to beg the government to remove him. The government did nothing. Then, in the late spring of 1920, Wu Peifu marched his army north out of Hunan, the governor's position collapsed, and he fled. Hunan's own troops marched back into Changsha. So Hunan was rid of its tyrant. Mao's question was what came next. Notice what Mao was not, yet. He was not a communist. He was a reformer, a patriot and a Hunanese, and his first instinct was to make his own province a model for the rest. And his answer was ambitious. He wanted more than to get rid of the corrupt bosses. He wanted to change the system that kept producing despots like them. Years later he remembered it this way. He and his friends were disgusted with the government in the north, and believed that Hunan could modernise faster if it cut its ties with the capital. So they agitated for separation. This was not quite as wild as it sounds. In 1920 and 1921 the idea of a China made of self governing provinces, bound together in a federation, was taken up all over the country, by provincial gentry, by students and even by some of the generals. If Beijing could not govern China, the thinking went, then start smaller. Let each province put its own house in order, under its own constitution, and build the nation from the bottom up. Mao threw himself into it. He filled the Changsha papers with articles calling for Hunan to govern itself, even to become a republic of its own. And he did not think small. If the people of Hunan took the lead now, he wrote, other provinces would follow. "If the Hunan people can take the lead now, then Shaanxi, Fujian, Sichuan, and Anhui provinces, having similar conditions, will follow" Within ten or twenty years, he thought, the rest of China would come along. The man now running Hunan was its old governor, Tan Yankai, back in Changsha once more. He liked the sound of self rule, at least as a way of keeping the northern armies out. On the tenth of October 1920, the anniversary of the rising that had brought down the empire, a demonstration of ten thousand people marched through Changsha and delivered a resolution on self government to Tan Yankai. Mao was one of its organisers. The resolution called for a convention, chosen by the people, to write Hunan a constitution. On the seventh of November there was another huge demonstration in Changsha, and Mao marched in it carrying a large banner for a great Hunan. And then the generals moved. In November 1920, one of Tan Yankai's own commanders, a general named Zhao Hengti, pushed him out and took Hunan for himself. Mao later described what happened next. Zhao pretended to back the self rule movement, and even talked of a United Autonomous States of China. But, Mao said, "as soon as he got power he suppressed the democratic movement with great energy." Hunan did get its provincial constitution, in the end. But it was a constitution that kept General Zhao in charge, and he went on ruling the province for years. The province's military leaders, in other words, crushed whatever democratic promise the movement had held. For Mao, this was the moment the reform road ran out. He wrote that in Hunan, there was absolutely no hope for political reform. The only thing left, he wrote, was to "carve out a new path, and create a new environment." He had tried petitions. He had tried demonstrations, articles and banners, and a province of his own. Every time, a man with an army had the last word. So what kind of path did a man with no army take? That question had an answer waiting, and it was coming from Russia.

Lev Karakhan
Lev Karakhan. Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

To understand why, you need to know how the world looked from China that year. A year earlier, China had joined the winning side of the World War, and the winners had rewarded it by handing the German rights in a Chinese province to Japan. Every great power in China was holding on to what the old treaties had given it. These were what the Chinese called the unequal treaties, forced on the empire over eighty years of defeats. They gave foreigners their own enclaves in the treaty ports, the coastal and river cities opened to foreign trade. Foreigners in China answered only to their own countries' courts, which is what extraterritoriality means. China could not even set its own tariffs on imports. And it was still paying the vast indemnity the powers had imposed after the Boxer rising of 1900, the war on the foreign legations in Beijing. And to the north, the biggest of the old imperial neighbours had just collapsed. The Russian empire had fallen in 1917, and the Bolsheviks had taken power. Their enemies, the Whites, fought on across Siberia, and the Allies, Japan above all, sent troops in to help them. By 1920 that venture was over. The White leader in Siberia, Admiral Kolchak, had been led out at Irkutsk on a cold January day and shot, and the Allied intervention had ended in dishonour. A visitor that summer could still see the wreckage of it everywhere. At Vladivostok, trains full of Czechoslovak troops stood waiting on the sidings, while the last armoured trains crawled across Manchuria at a few miles a day. Only now did the Chinese government begin to think seriously about how it would live with the new power to its north. A Chinese commission sent to look at conditions came back convinced that the old Russia was finished for good. In the meantime Moscow was improvising. On the old Russian lands along the Amur river, just north of Manchuria, it set up a buffer state, the Far Eastern Republic, where the class war would officially be put on hold and capitalism allowed to carry on. The Chinese press followed it closely, because nearly all that territory had once belonged to China, and because the Russian railway through Manchuria might still be turned into a Russian colony. And then that new power said it would give up everything the old one had taken. In July 1919, the Soviet government in Moscow issued a declaration addressed to the Chinese people. It took months to reach China, and when it was printed there in the spring of 1920, it caused a sensation. Moscow announced that it would give up its special rights in Manchuria, and cancel every one of the unequal treaties the tsars had signed with China. To the long suffering Chinese, it was a thunderbolt of goodwill. Student unions, newspapers and societies across the country greeted it with delight, and sent their thanks to Moscow. The government in Beijing was more careful. It would take years of bargaining before China and Soviet Russia recognised each other, and by then the offer had shrunk a good deal. It did take one step. In the autumn of 1920 it stopped recognising the old tsarist diplomats who still sat in their legation in Beijing, and took over the Russian concessions in its treaty ports. A second offer followed in 1920. It was signed by Karakhan, a Soviet diplomat, then the assistant commissar for foreign affairs in Moscow. And it was in startling contrast to the blood and thunder Moscow was putting out everywhere else. It is remembered as the Karakhan Manifesto. Not everyone was swept away. One foreign observer, who called the whole Soviet effort in China a Red failure, summed up the offer like this. "Briefly, Soviet Russia had offered to abolish all those things which had pressed on China in the past and had been imposed on her by Czarism, and for no other reason than that Soviet Russia loved China and wished to show her that the world republic had at last arrived." In return for China's formal recognition, he noted, Moscow proposed to give up the Boxer indemnity, the Russian enclaves in the treaty ports, its extraterritorial rights and the limits on China's tariffs. And the great railway the tsars had driven across Manchuria would become a purely commercial business, which China would one day be able to buy out. Not at once, of course, the journalist added. In a future always slightly removed from any date anyone suggested. He had a point. The first declaration, as the Chinese read it, had promised to hand that railway back for nothing. Later, Moscow said that promise had never been in the original text at all. The railway itself mattered enormously. The Chinese Eastern Railway ran straight across Manchuria to the Russian port of Vladivostok, and whoever ran it had a hand on the throat of the north east. The journalist had a story about the pact, too. The man who drafted it, he claimed, was a former Russian vice consul from Shanghai, who had bought his own safety from the Bolsheviks by promising that China would accept it. But to a young Chinese reader, the small print hardly mattered. What mattered was that someone had said it at all, in public, and to China as an equal. Set that beside what the winners had just done at Paris, and you can see why it landed the way it did. Moscow, in other words, was offering friendship to China while the West had offered it Versailles. You could argue about whether the offer was sincere. Plenty of young Chinese did not want to argue. And there was more to Moscow than diplomacy. The same revolutionaries who signed that declaration also ran an organisation whose whole purpose was to spread their revolution to the rest of the world. Their leader, Lenin, had come to a striking conclusion about countries like China. The great empires of Europe drew their strength from their colonies and their privileges in Asia, so a revolt in Asia would strike at them from behind. And in a country like China, he argued, the few communists should ally for now with the nationalists fighting the foreign powers, even nationalists who were not socialists at all. That organisation was already on its way to China.

Chen Duxiu
Chen Duxiu. Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

It was called the Comintern, founded in Moscow in 1919 to bring together communist parties everywhere under Moscow's lead. Its first representatives arrived in China from Moscow in March 1920. The most important of them was a young man named Grigori Voitinsky. He was twenty seven, tall and energetic, with dark curly hair and sad, thoughtful eyes, and he spoke fluent English. He had learned that English as a young emigrant labourer in North America, before the revolution called him home. He travelled with his wife, Kuznetsova, and an interpreter named Yang, and in April 1920 the little party reached Beijing, to build ties with radical Chinese. Their way in was a Russian who taught at Beijing University, named Polevoi. Through him, Voitinsky met Li Dazhao. Li Dazhao was the university's librarian and a professor of economics. A year and a half before, he had given Mao Zedong an assistant's job in the library, at eight dollars a month. Li was about thirty, the son of a farming family from the north, who had studied in Japan. And he had been one of the first in China to write in praise of the Bolsheviks, back in 1918, in an essay celebrating their victory. In the spring of 1919 he had edited a whole issue of New Youth on Marx, and at the university he gathered students around him to read Marx together. Li took up the idea of a Chinese communist party wholeheartedly. But before going any further, he told Voitinsky, he should talk to Chen Duxiu. So at the end of April, carrying a letter of recommendation from Li Dazhao, Voitinsky, his wife and the interpreter arrived in Shanghai. Let me tell you about the man they were going to see. Chen Duxiu was in his early forties, the son of a gentry family in Anhui, who had passed the first of the old examinations as a young man and then gone to study in Japan. In September 1915 he had founded a magazine in the International Settlement of Shanghai, called Youth, which soon became New Youth. Its message to young Chinese was blunt. Throw off Confucius, throw off the classical language, and take up science and democracy. In the very first issue he had told young people to be independent, not servile, progressive, not conservative, and scientific, not imaginative. The students who read it gave those two ideas nicknames, Mr. Science and Mr. Democracy, and vowed to use them to save a China suffering from warlordism within and imperialism from outside. Chen became a dean at Beijing University. And when the students marched in May 1919, he stood with them, and came out of it a new kind of political leader. After his months in prison, Beijing was no longer safe for him, and he settled in Shanghai. There is a story the party later told about how he left. Li Dazhao, it is said, smuggled him out of the capital in a mule cart, and somewhere on the road the two men agreed that China needed a communist party. Party histories still pair the two men in a little rhyme, Chen in the south and Li in the north. Shanghai was a good place for a man the police wanted. Much of it was run by foreigners, in the International Settlement and the French Concession, and Chinese police could not simply walk in and arrest someone there. Chen's rented house in a lane of the French Concession became at once his home, the office of New Youth, and before long the meeting place of China's first communists. That summer of 1920, Voitinsky held frequent meetings with Chen Duxiu and other radicals. He brought money as well as ideas, enough to pay for printing, for rooms, and for young organisers who could now give all their time to the cause. They decided to use New Youth as a platform for spreading communist ideas and uniting China's radicals. And they did. From the autumn of 1920, the magazine that had preached science and democracy began to print articles on Soviet Russia and the class struggle. Think about how far Chen had travelled. Five years earlier he had asked young Chinese to put their faith in science and democracy, in the Western sense. Since then he had watched what the republic, and the West, did with those ideals. He was ready for something harder. That August, the first complete Chinese translation of the Communist Manifesto came off a press in Shanghai. And that same summer, Chen and a handful of young men in Shanghai formed the first communist group in China, with a youth league alongside it to recruit students. They opened a school for foreign languages, where young recruits learned Russian before being sent to study in Moscow. They ran a night school for workers, and started a monthly magazine called The Communist. The meetings between Voitinsky's people and the radicals produced study groups, and those groups would form the basis of the Chinese Communist Party. Groups followed in Beijing, around Li Dazhao, and in Wuhan, Jinan, Changsha and Guangzhou, and among Chinese students in Tokyo and in France. By the summer of 1921 there were already six communist cells in China. It is worth asking what the Russians brought that the Chinese did not already have. Not ideas, exactly. You could read Marx in a library. What they brought was organisation. A plan, money, a model of how a small, disciplined party could take a vast country. And the example of Russia, where that had just happened. At the end of 1920, Chen Duxiu himself left Shanghai for the south. The general who held Guangzhou had invited him to run the province's schools. That general's name was Chen Jiongming. Remember it. It will matter to us very soon.

Back in Changsha, Mao had been doing his own reading. He had met Chen Duxiu in Shanghai in the spring of 1920, and talked with him about Marxism and about Hunan, and he later said that Chen had influenced him at a critical moment in his life. Back home, he opened a bookshop in Changsha to sell the new books and magazines, and set up a society to study Russia. He was running a primary school too, and organising among the city's workers. Many of his friends had gone abroad. Between 1919 and 1920 well over a thousand young Chinese went to France, to work in its factories and study in its schools. Mao helped organise the young people from Hunan who went, and saw some of them off at Shanghai. But he did not go himself. He said later that he felt he did not yet know enough about his own country. Among the young Chinese in Europe in those years were a young man from a gentry family in Jiangsu named Zhou Enlai, and a sixteen year old from Sichuan named Deng Xiaoping. We will be hearing a great deal more about both of them. From France, the members of Mao's study society wrote long letters home, arguing about what China should do. In the autumn of 1920, the British philosopher came to Changsha to lecture, and Mao was in the audience. He had come to China straight from a visit to Soviet Russia, where he had met Lenin, and he had come away deeply disillusioned with what he saw. The philosopher argued that China could reach socialism gently, through education, without a dictatorship and without violence. Many of Mao's friends found that appealing. But one of those in France, his friend Cai Hesen, wrote that China needed a communist party on the Russian model, and soon. Another friend, Xiao Yu, had been the society's first general secretary, in the post Mao turned down. "I advocate a moderate revolution, a revolution with education as its instrument", he wrote, and he rejected the Russian kind. Mao did not agree. He thought absolute liberalism, anarchism and democracy were all very well. But, he wrote, "these things sound very good in theory, but are not feasible in reality." How could education reform the exploiters, he asked, when education itself was in the hands of those very same capitalists? By November 1920 Mao had fixed on Bolshevism, with its programme of world socialist revolution, as his creed. He wrote back to Cai Hesen that he agreed with him completely. Xiao Yu never came round. He broke with Mao, went his own way, and ended his days far from China, in South America. Two friends from the same society, reading the same letters, had chosen opposite roads. That was happening all over China. At a meeting of the study society in Changsha that winter, he argued for the Russian road, and most of the members voted with him. Quietly, he set up a communist group in Changsha, and a youth league to go with it, recruiting from among his own pupils and friends. Why did he turn? Here the sources disagree. Mao's own answer, given years later, was that his conversion to Marxism came in 1920 out of three things: his work organising workers in Changsha, his reading of Marxist books, and his interest in the revolution in Russia. Others who have studied his life see something harder. What drew him to Bolshevism, in their view, was less its dream of equality than its case for violence, the triumph of will, and the celebration of power. I would only point out that the two answers fit the same year, and the same young man we have just been following. Remember what Hunan had taught him. Whatever else Bolshevism offered him, it offered a way for people with no army to build one, and to win. He was not alone in that conclusion. All over China that year, young men and women who had marched in 1919 were reaching the same place by different roads. Some had been anarchists, some liberals, some simply patriots who had watched Versailles. What they shared was the conviction that China needed something total, and needed it now. And within a year there were enough of them to found a party.

That summer a new man arrived from Moscow to help them do it. On the third of June, a new representative of the Comintern reached China. He was a Dutchman who went by the name Maring. Maring had spent years in the Dutch East Indies, today's Indonesia, organising socialists and trade unionists there before he came to work for Moscow. The summer before, in Moscow, he had served as secretary of the commission that drew up the Comintern's line on the colonies, the line that told communists in Asia to work alongside the nationalists. So he arrived in China with a very clear idea of what a communist party there should do, and it was not the idea most of the young Chinese had. He did not make a good first impression. One of the young Chinese he worked with found him aggressive and hard to deal with. That was Zhang Guotao, a student leader from Beijing University, who would become one of the party's founders and, years later, one of its great defectors. Maring and a second man from the Comintern, named Nikolsky, pressed the Shanghai group to call a congress, and invitations went out to the groups across China. The Comintern paid the delegates' travel. It was the first, but very far from the last, time that Moscow's money would keep the Chinese party going. Who came? Most of the founders of the Chinese Communist Party came out of the circle around Li Dazhao at Beijing University. The first score of China's communists were all students, young teachers and journalists. There were no workers or peasants among them. Twelve delegates assembled in Shanghai, two each from Shanghai, Beijing, Wuhan, Changsha and Jinan, and one each from Guangzhou and from the students in Tokyo. Mao was one of the two from Changsha. The other was his friend He Shuheng, a teacher in his forties, by far the oldest man there. One of the delegates from Wuhan, Dong Biwu, was an old hand by comparison, a man who had joined Sun Yat-sen's revolutionary league before the empire fell. Twenty eight years later, he and Mao would be the only two men from that room standing on the rostrum when the People's Republic was proclaimed. And at the time, the entire party they represented had just fifty three members. The two men who had done most to bring the party into being were not there. Li Dazhao stayed in Beijing. And Chen Duxiu was in Guangzhou, serving in Chen Jiongming's government, so it was decided to hold the founding congress without him. Chen sent a young man to represent him instead. It meant that the party's acknowledged leader would be chosen in his absence. The congress opened on the twenty third of July, in a room of the girls' school dormitory where the delegates were lodging. The school was in Shanghai's French Concession, and empty for the summer holidays. Fifteen people took part in all, counting the two men from the Comintern. Two days in, for security, Maring had the sessions moved to the house of one of the delegates, Li Hanjun, nearby. It was a room full of young men, most of them in their twenties, arguing about how to remake a country of four hundred million people. And Mao? He said very little. He spoke only once, giving a brief report on the Bolshevik group in Changsha. Zhang Guotao, who chaired the meetings, remembered him as a pale faced young man who looked like a Daoist priest out of some village. It's worth remembering that picture. The quiet country delegate in the corner would one day rule the country they were all talking about. The real arguments were about how fast to go. A majority stood for the dictatorship of the proletariat, the rule of the working class. Li Hanjun, the delegate whose house they were in, knew Marx's economics well. He was cautious. He warned against trying to hurry a socialist revolution in a backward country. He had studied in Japan, like so many of them, and he spoke for the slower road. He was quickly overwhelmed. There was a second argument, about whether the party should work with anyone else, even Sun Yat-sen's Nationalists. The majority wanted nothing to do with any other party. Which is a striking thing, when you think about it. These young men had a party of fifty three members, with no workers to speak of. And most of them wanted to go straight for the dictatorship of the workers.

On the evening of the thirtieth of July, a week into the congress, the delegates were meeting in Li Hanjun's house when the door opened. A middle aged man in a black robe looked into the room. He said he was looking for someone, decided he had the wrong house, and went away. Most likely, he was an informer for the police. Maring was very agitated, and ordered everyone to disperse at once. Most of them got out. Two stayed behind: Li Hanjun, since it was his house, and the delegate from Guangzhou, a young man named Chen Gongbo. Not a quarter of an hour passed before the French police burst in. The house was in the French Concession, so it was the French authorities who came for them. The foreign police in Shanghai were nervous about Bolshevik agents in those years, and a foreigner from Moscow meeting with young Chinese radicals was exactly what they were watching for. Li Hanjun kept his nerve. There was no meeting, he told them. Just a few professors, talking over the plans of a publishing house. Chen Gongbo had his own story ready. He was a professor at a law school in Guangdong, he said, in Shanghai on his summer vacation. The police searched the house, without much effort, and found nothing. And in one of the drawers of the desk in Li Hanjun's bedroom, the whole time, lay a draft of the programme for the Communist Party of China. They never found it. So the Chinese Communist Party survived its first raid, by luck and a good cover story. But the delegates could not go back to the house, and Shanghai suddenly felt full of eyes. If they wanted to finish what they had started, they would have to do it somewhere else.

The answer came from a woman. Wang Huiwu was the wife of Li Da, one of the Shanghai communists, and she came from the town of Jiaxing, on the shore of South Lake, about thirty five miles south of Shanghai in Zhejiang province. She was a young campaigner for women's rights in her own right, and one of the very few women anywhere near the founding of the party. She proposed that they move there. On a lake, they could meet on a boat, where nobody could walk in on them. The next day, the thirty first of July, the remaining delegates, Mao among them, took the train to Jiaxing. They put up at a local hotel with the cheerful name of the Happy Couples. Not everyone came. Chen Gongbo, the man who had faced down the police, had been badly frightened, and he and his wife promptly left for a few days in Hangzhou instead. Maring and the other man from the Comintern stayed away too. A pair of Europeans on a pleasure boat in a small Chinese lake town would have drawn every eye on the water. So the Chinese finished their congress on their own. They hired one of the boats that took holiday parties out on the lake, and spent the day on the water, looking for all the world like a party of friends on an outing. Picture it. A pleasure boat out on a lake, and on board, a boatload of young men debating the dictatorship of the proletariat. And without the men from Moscow in the room, they went further than Moscow wanted. Moscow's men had wanted a patient party, one that would build up its strength among the workers and work with China's nationalists. The young delegates wanted none of that. In the absence of the Comintern's representatives, the delegates adopted a programme, a decision on the party's aims and a manifesto, all in extreme left, ultra revolutionary versions. The programme called for a revolutionary army of the proletariat to overthrow the capitalist classes, for the dictatorship of the proletariat, and for an end to private property. Then they unanimously chose Chen Duxiu, still far away in Guangzhou, as secretary of the party's Central Bureau. So the party's first leader was chosen by a congress he never attended. At the end, out on the lake, the young delegates shouted together. "Long live the Chinese Communist Party!" And that was it. The Chinese Communist Party existed. Years later, when nobody could remember the exact day the congress had opened, the party settled on the first of July as its birthday, and it still celebrates it then. Chen Duxiu came back to Shanghai a few weeks later to take up the job, and he would lead the party through the first six years of its life. And Mao went home to Changsha as the party's man in Hunan, and set about finding the workers the party claimed to speak for. It is easy to make this moment bigger than it was. A handful of young men on a boat, with no army and no money of their own, voting to bring the dictatorship of the proletariat to a country where almost nobody had heard the word. Their futures could not have been more different. Some of the men at that congress would die for the party, some would leave it, and two would end up serving Japan. One of them would rule China. So why did they turn to Moscow at all? Because Moscow was the only great power that seemed to be offering China anything. Because in every province, a general with an army had the last word, and petitions and banners had not changed that. And because Russia had just shown that a small party, disciplined enough, could seize a whole country. Whether that lesson would work in China, nobody on that boat could know. The grand programme would not survive long in that form. Moscow had other plans for the young party, and those plans involved the very nationalists it had just refused to work with. Meanwhile, the man they chose to lead them was in Guangzhou, serving in the government of a southern general. That general, Chen Jiongming, was also the military muscle behind Sun Yat-sen, the old revolutionary who had founded the Nationalist Party and been, briefly, the republic's first president. Sun had no army of his own. Before long, that same general would turn against him, and that is where we pick up next time.

Sources