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Founding of the Chinese Communist Party (1921)

In July 1921, the CCP's First Congress met in Shanghai, then moved to a boat on Jiaxing's South Lake, proclaiming the Party's founding. Comintern representatives guided it. The CCP adopted the Leninist democratic-centralist model emphasizing proletarian dictatorship — the institutional basis for seizing and monopolizing power.

Time

July 23 – early August 1921 (opened July 23 in Shanghai; moved to South Lake, Jiaxing on July 30)

Place

106 Wangzhi Road, French Concession, Shanghai (now 76 Xingye Road); a boat on South Lake, Jiaxing

Key figures

13 delegates (Mao Zedong, He Shuheng, Dong Biwu, etc.); Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao absent; Comintern reps Maring and Nikolsky guided

Background: May Fourth and the Comintern

After the 1919 May Fourth Movement, Marxism spread fast among Chinese intellectuals. In 1920 the Comintern sent Voitinsky to help Chen Duxiu (Shanghai) and Li Dazhao (Beijing) build communist cells. In spring 1921 they agreed to convene a national congress.

The Comintern supplied not just ideology but funds. From birth the CCP was a Comintern branch, taking Moscow's direction and money — an "external transfusion" marking it as an instrument of the international communist movement.

Detailed timeline

July 23, 1921: The First Congress opened at 106 Wangzhi Road, French Concession, Shanghai (Li Hanjun's brother's residence). Thirteen delegates spoke for 50+ members nationwide.

Evening of July 30: Mid-session, a stranger intruded (suspected French Concession police spy); delegates scattered. Maring proposed relocating.

Early August 1921 (exact date disputed; August 2 per one account): Delegates railed to Jiaxing, rented a boat on South Lake, and finished: adopting the program and resolutions, electing the absent Chen Duxiu as Central Bureau secretary. The CCP was proclaimed.

Delegates and controversies

Impact

Sinicizing the Leninist party. Democratic centralism, proletarian dictatorship, Party commands gun — organizational DNA. A century of campaigns, purges and dictatorship trace here.

Original sin of a Comintern branch. Founded on foreign funds and directives, the CCP's "patriotic" narrative sits uneasily with this history. After the 1927 split it shook off Comintern control, but the Leninist model endures.

China before the Party: what existed and what was missing

The May Fourth Movement of 1919 was triggered by the decision at Paris to transfer Germany's former rights in Shandong to Japan. On 4 May 1919 more than three thousand students from thirteen Beijing institutions marched on Tiananmen, burned the house of the minister Cao Rulin and beat the envoy Zhang Zongxiang. Within weeks the movement had spread to Shanghai, where in June it drew in striking workers and closing merchants, and forced the dismissal of the pro-Japanese officials. In its aftermath the journals that mattered to young intellectuals, above all New Youth and the Weekly Review, carried substantially more material on Marxism than before. Li Dazhao's essay “My Views on Marxism,” serialized in New Youth in the autumn of 1919, was the most systematic exposition of the doctrine then available in Chinese. But expounding a doctrine and organizing a party are two different things. At the end of 1919 China possessed no communist party, no settled usage even for the name, and no organizational connection among the scattered circles in different cities whose members described themselves variously as socialists, communists or anarchists, often in the same breath.

The force that turned circles into a party came from Moscow. The Communist International had been founded in March 1919, and its Second Congress, held in July and August 1920, adopted Lenin's Twenty-One Conditions of admission. Member parties were to be constructed on democratic centralism, to carry out the decisions of the Comintern's Executive Committee, to submit to iron discipline, and to pay regular dues. In April 1920 the Comintern's Far Eastern apparatus sent Grigori Voitinsky to China, travelling by way of Vladivostok and using a Chinese alias. He met Li Dazhao in Beijing and then, carrying Li's introduction, Chen Duxiu in Shanghai, accompanied throughout by the interpreter Yang Mingzhai, a Chinese worker long resident in Russia. What written mandate Voitinsky carried, and how formal his instructions were, remains genuinely debated among historians working from the Russian archives. What is not debated is the sequence of his meetings and what followed them. This page records the itinerary and the results and invents no credentials beyond them.

Chen Duxiu's own circumstances shaped the site of the founding. He had been arrested in June 1919 for distributing leaflets demanding the return of Shandong, and after his release he left Beijing for Shanghai, settling in the French Concession at 2 Old Yuyang Lane, where the editorial office of New Youth doubled as the movement's meeting place. In May 1920 Chen, Li Hanjun, Chen Wangdao and others formed a society for the study of Marxism. In August 1920 Chen Wangdao's translation of the Communist Manifesto, the first complete Chinese version, was published in Shanghai. A typesetting error on the cover of the first printing garbled the title, an error corrected in the reprint, and surviving copies of the misprinted edition are now museum pieces. That slim pamphlet, read in study groups from Beijing to Changsha, became the common primer of every group formed in the following year.

The local groups, August 1920 to spring 1921

The Shanghai communist group was formed in August 1920, its members including Chen Duxiu, Li Hanjun, Li Da, Chen Wangdao and Yu Xiusong. New Youth became its organ, and a cheap popular weekly, Labour World, was launched beside it. The Shanghai group functioned in practice as an initiating group for the whole country, corresponding with activists in other cities, drafting the founding documents and setting the standards by which new members would be admitted. A Beijing group followed in the autumn of 1920 under Li Dazhao, recruited largely from Peking University, where Zhang Guotao, Deng Zhongxia, Gao Junyu and He Mengxiong were among its members. In Changsha, Mao Zedong and He Shuheng built a group out of the membership of the New People's Study Society, and Mao wrote to friends in November 1920 stating explicitly that he now favoured organizing a communist party. Wuhan acquired a group around Dong Biwu and Chen Tanqiu, working from an address in Wuchang. Jinan had Wang Jinmei and Deng Enming. The Guangzhou group passed through repeated reorganizations, at first involving Russian participants, then re-formed under Chen Gongbo and Tan Pingshan; at one stage it dissolved altogether over internal disagreements before being rebuilt. Abroad, Chinese students in Japan formed a group associated with Shi Cuntong and Zhou Fohai, and in France Zhang Shenfu, Liu Qingyang and Zhou Enlai were active. The distinction among these groups matters for the congress itself, because Zhou Fohai attended as the representative of the students in Japan, while the France group, which later supplied so many of the party's leaders, sent no delegate at all.

In November 1920 the Shanghai initiating group drafted a Manifesto of the Chinese Communist Party, one of the earliest programmatic texts to survive, declaring that the aim of communists was to create a new society according to communist principles. The manifesto was not published. It circulated inside the groups as a test for admitting members, which tells the reader something real about the organization's character in its first months: programmatic, secretive and selective. The Shanghai group also opened a semi-public Foreign Languages School on Avenue Joffre, ostensibly teaching Russian, in fact recruiting and vetting young activists. Its students included Liu Shaoqi, Ren Bishi and Xiao Jingguang, who were sent in the spring of 1921 to the Communist University of the Toilers of the East in Moscow. The pipeline that defined the party's first decade — organization in the Chinese cities, training in Moscow, return as cadres — was therefore already running before the party formally existed.

Money cannot be left out of an honest account. Research based on the Comintern archives in Moscow shows that during 1921 and 1922 the Comintern and its Far Eastern organs supplied the Chinese organization with operating funds and with subsidies for publications and schools, channelled through Voitinsky, Maring and their intermediaries. The totals differ from file to file and according to what is counted, running from several hundred yuan a month to more than a thousand, and no responsible archive should print a single figure as settled. The political fact behind the bookkeeping is clearer than the sums. In his report to the Comintern Executive Committee in 1922, Chen Duxiu acknowledged that the greater part of the party's operating funds came from the Comintern. Financial dependence and organizational subordination arrived together, and together they form the indispensable background to the decisions of 1922 and 1923, when the young party accepted, against the initial judgment of its own leaders, the Comintern's instruction to cooperate with the Nationalists from inside their party.

The congress day by day: from a girls' school dormitory to the South Lake boat

The thirteen delegates can be named in full, and naming them is the beginning of accuracy. From Shanghai came Li Da and Li Hanjun. From Beijing, Zhang Guotao and Liu Renjing. From Changsha, Mao Zedong and He Shuheng. From Wuhan, Dong Biwu and Chen Tanqiu. From Jinan, Wang Jinmei and Deng Enming. From Guangzhou, Chen Gongbo. From the Chinese students in Japan, Zhou Fohai. And Bao Huiseng attended on the personal commission of Chen Duxiu, who with Li Dazhao was the most conspicuous absentee from his own party's founding. Between them the thirteen spoke for seven local groups and a national membership of a little over fifty. Their average age was about twenty-eight. Wang Jinmei and Deng Enming were barely twenty. In Shanghai the delegates lodged, for cover, at the Bowen Girls' School, passing themselves off as a Peking University summer tour party, while Li Da, his wife Wang Huiwu, and Li Hanjun handled the notifications, the liaison and the watching of doors.

The congress opened on the evening of 23 July 1921 in the residence of Li Shucheng, elder brother of Li Hanjun, at 106 Wangzhi Road in the French Concession, a stone-gated house that still stands. Maring and Nikolsky were present. Zhang Guotao reported on the preparations and took the chair, and Liu Renjing kept the notes. The surviving accounts agree on the rough shape of the following days. Local work reports occupied 24 July. The congress recessed on 25 and 26 July while Li Hanjun, Dong Biwu, Liu Renjing, Zhang Guotao and Chen Gongbo drafted the program and the resolutions. Debate on the drafts ran from 27 to 29 July and was sharp enough to be remembered differently by almost everyone present. Liu Renjing insisted on immediate action toward dictatorship and dismissed study as evasion; Li Hanjun argued for research, legality and preparation; the room divided over whether party members might sit in parliament or accept government office under a regime the program proposed to overthrow. These were not procedural quarrels. They were the first recorded form of an argument the party would conduct with itself, at far higher cost, for the next fifty years.

On the evening of 30 July, while Maring was addressing the meeting, a stranger in a long gown pushed open the door, looked carefully round the room, said he had entered the wrong house and withdrew. Maring, who had worked underground in the Dutch East Indies and knew police methods, judged the man a detective and ordered the meeting scattered at once. The delegates left in small groups by different doors. Later investigation has commonly identified the intruder with Cheng Ziqing, an operative working for the French Concession police; commonly identified is still an inference rather than a proof, and this page marks it accordingly. That the danger was real is not inference. Detectives searched the Li house later that night. They found nothing, the papers having been removed, and Li Hanjun and Chen Gongbo, who had not left with the others, faced the search in person. Chen Gongbo, newly married and shaken, left Shanghai for Guangzhou with his wife the following day and took no part in the final session.

The last session of the congress took longer to fix in the historical record than any other detail of the founding. The remaining delegates, Chen Gongbo gone and Li Hanjun remaining in Shanghai, took an early train to Jiaxing in Zhejiang, where Wang Huiwu had hired in advance a pleasure boat on South Lake and laid in wine and dishes as cover. The meeting proceeded on the water, with Wang Huiwu seated at the bow keeping watch, ready, by her own later account, to hum a tune as a warning when other boats drew near. On the boat the congress adopted the Program of the Chinese Communist Party and the Resolution on Current Practical Work, and elected a Central Bureau by secret ballot: Chen Duxiu, in absentia, as secretary, Zhang Guotao responsible for organization, and Li Da for propaganda. The date of that session resisted settlement for sixty years. Party historians in the 1980s, cross-checking railway records, weather reports and the delegates' memoirs, gave the strongest support to 3 August, with 2 August also defended in print, and official party history prudently says only early August. This page follows that caution. A party founded in secrecy left no minutes, and the price of secrecy is a permanent margin of uncertainty around its first day.

What the program actually said, and what came next

The Program adopted on South Lake survives only in the Russian and English versions preserved in the Comintern archives; the Chinese original is lost, and the texts in modern editions are retranslations. Its fifteen articles, one of them missing even from the archival copies, named the party the Communist Party of China, committed its revolutionary army to the overthrow of the rule of the capitalist class, recognized the dictatorship of the proletariat as the goal until class distinctions should be abolished, prescribed the abolition of capitalist private property and the confiscation of machinery, land, factories and semi-finished goods as means of production, and bound the party to unite with the Third International. The accompanying resolution on practical work directed the party toward trade unions, workers' schools and workers' publications, and required its members to sever relations with every other political party. Read plainly, the documents are the charter of a Leninist combat party committed in principle to dictatorship and expropriation. They are also the charter of a party of some fifty members possessing no army, no territory and no mass following of any kind. The distance between the program of 1921 and the state power of 1949 was closed by twenty-eight years of organization, alliance, betrayal and war, and that distance is not an embarrassment to the founding record. It is the founding record's central fact.

Chen Duxiu returned to Shanghai in September 1921 to take up the secretaryship to which he had been elected in his absence. In October 1921 the French Concession police arrested him, together with Yang Mingzhai, Zhang Guotao and others, over material published in New Youth. He was released after intervention arranged through Maring and the payment of a fine, the first arrest of the party's principal leader to enter the record, and not the last. In July 1922 the Second Congress, meeting in Shanghai, resolved formally to join the Communist International as its Chinese branch, and at the same time adopted a democratic-revolution program recognizing that the Chinese revolution at its present stage was democratic in character, a necessary correction to the maximalism of the South Lake program. In August 1922 Maring pressed upon a reluctant leadership, at a meeting by West Lake in Hangzhou, the Comintern's proposal that Communists enter the Nationalist Party as individuals; Chen Duxiu resisted, then submitted, and the Third Congress of June 1923 formalized the united front. Only from that point did the organization outgrow the dimensions of a circle. Membership stood at just over four hundred in 1923 and at nearly ten thousand by 1925, on the strength of a mass movement the fifty men of 1921 could not have supplied from their own ranks.

What became of the thirteen, and where July 1 came from

The later lives of the thirteen delegates amount to a compressed history of the early party, and they deserve to be recorded individually rather than summarized. Mao Zedong died in Beijing in 1976, the party's and then the state's supreme leader for life. Dong Biwu died in Beijing in 1975, the only other delegate to travel the whole distance from the First Congress to the founding of the People's Republic. He Shuheng, left behind in the Soviet area when the main forces departed on the Long March, was killed in Fujian in February 1935, surrounded by Nationalist troops; the accounts differ on whether he died by a bullet or by leaping from a cliff, and the difference has never been resolved. Chen Tanqiu, serving as the party's representative in Xinjiang, was secretly murdered by the warlord Sheng Shicai in 1943. Wang Jinmei died of tuberculosis at Qingdao in 1925, aged twenty-seven. Deng Enming, arrested at Jinan in 1928, was shot by the Nationalist authorities of Shandong in 1931. Li Da broke with Chen Duxiu over the united front and left the party in 1923, spent a quarter of a century as a theorist and university teacher, rejoined in 1949 on Mao's personal introduction, and was persecuted to death in Wuhan in 1966, in the opening months of the Cultural Revolution. Li Hanjun left the party in 1922 and was arrested and killed by Guangxi-clique forces at Wuhan in 1927. Liu Renjing was expelled in 1929 for Trotskyism, survived decades of obscurity and punishment, and died in Beijing in 1987. Chen Gongbo left in 1923, studied in the United States, rose to high office in Wang Jingwei's collaborationist government at Nanjing, and was executed for treason at Suzhou in 1946. Zhou Fohai left in 1924, became vice-president of the Executive Yuan in the same collaborationist regime, saw a death sentence commuted to life imprisonment in 1946, and died in a Nanjing prison in 1948. Bao Huiseng drifted out of the party after 1927, held office for a time under the Nationalist government, and died in Beijing in 1957. Zhang Guotao, the congress's chairman and for seventeen years one of the party's most powerful men, defected to the Nationalists at Wuhan in 1938 and died in exile in Toronto in 1979. Of thirteen men, four were killed by the party's enemies, one died young of disease, at least six left, broke or were expelled, and two remained within the party to the end.

The founding anniversary has a documentary history of its own, and an archive should state it plainly rather than repeat the date as if it were self-evident. For years after 1921 the party had neither the security nor the leisure to celebrate itself. In 1938, at Yan'an, Mao proposed that 1 July be observed as the founding anniversary. The only delegates to the First Congress then present at Yan'an were Mao himself and Dong Biwu, and neither man could recall the exact day of the congress, only that it had fallen in July. In 1941 the Central Committee formally fixed 1 July as the anniversary, in the party's twentieth year. The actual dates were recovered only after 1949, through the memoirs of participants and, decisively, through the Comintern archives, and party historians confirmed in the 1980s that the congress had opened on 23 July. China therefore keeps two dates in parallel to this day, the commemoration on 1 July and the event on 23 July. There is nothing discreditable in the arrangement, but an archive page that printed 1 July as the date of the congress would be printing a decision of 1941 as a fact of 1921.

The Shanghai site was located, restored and opened as a memorial hall in 1952; its address, renumbered in the intervening decades, is now 76 Xingye Road. The original South Lake boat had long since disappeared, and the Red Boat moored at Jiaxing today is a reconstruction built in 1959 to the remembered dimensions of the hired pleasure boats of 1921, a fact stated in the Jiaxing memorial's own published introduction. Official commemoration prefers the language of the “Red Boat spirit,” and for decades its permanent exhibitions gave little space to the full names and functions of Maring and Nikolsky, and none to the question of Comintern financing, though more recent displays have added material on both. The evidence for the congress itself remains what it has always been. No stenographic record was made, no minutes survive in Chinese, and the narrative rests on the memoirs of men who later became enemies of one another, on surviving correspondence, and on the files the Comintern kept in Moscow. Details in this page that depend on a single memoir are the record as it exists, not the record as anyone would wish it to be, and they should be read with that limitation held firmly in mind.

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