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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.

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.

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.

The May Fourth Movement of 1919 was triggered by the Paris decision to transfer Germany's rights in Shandong to Japan. On 4 May more than 3,000 students from 13 Beijing institutions marched, burned the house of Cao Rulin and beat the minister Zhang Zongxiang; by June the movement had drawn in Shanghai workers and merchants. Afterwards journals such as New Youth and the Weekly Review carried markedly more material on Marxism. Li Dazhao's “My Views on Marxism,” serialized in New Youth in 1919, was the most systematic exposition then available in Chinese. But expounding a doctrine and organizing a party are different things. At the end of 1919 China had no communist party, no agreed use even of the name, and no organizational links among the scattered circles calling themselves socialist or communist.

The push that turned circles into a party came from Moscow. The Communist International, founded in March 1919, held its Second Congress in July–August 1920 and adopted Lenin's Twenty-One Conditions: member parties were to be built on democratic centralism, to carry out Executive Committee decisions, and to pay regular dues. In April 1920 the Comintern's Far Eastern apparatus sent Grigori Voitinsky, travelling under a Chinese alias, by way of Vladivostok to Beijing, where he met Li Dazhao, and then, with Li's introduction, to Shanghai to meet Chen Duxiu, accompanied by the interpreter Yang Mingzhai. What written mandate Voitinsky carried remains debated in the scholarship drawing on Russian archives; this page records his itinerary and its results, and invents no credentials for him.

Chen Duxiu's circumstances matter too. Arrested in June 1919 for distributing leaflets, he left Beijing after his release and settled in early 1920 in the Shanghai French Concession, where the New Youth editorial office doubled as the movement's meeting place. In May 1920 Chen, Li Hanjun, Chen Wangdao and others formed a Marxist study society. Chen Wangdao's translation of the Communist Manifesto, the first complete Chinese version, appeared in August 1920; a typesetting error on the first printing's cover misprinted the title, corrected in the reprint. That pamphlet became the common primer of the local groups that followed.

The Shanghai communist group was formed in August 1920 — Chen Duxiu, Li Hanjun, Li Da, Chen Wangdao, Yu Xiusong and others — with New Youth as its organ and a popular paper, Labour World, beside it. It functioned in practice as an initiating group, corresponding with the provinces and drafting the founding documents. A Beijing group followed in the autumn under Li Dazhao, its members largely Peking University students and staff, Zhang Guotao, Deng Zhongxia, Gao Junyu and He Mengxiong among them. In Changsha, Mao Zedong and He Shuheng built a group out of the New People's Study Society; Mao wrote to friends in November 1920 explicitly endorsing the formation of a communist party. Wuhan had a group around Dong Biwu and Chen Tanqiu, Jinan one around Wang Jinmei and Deng Enming. The Guangzhou group went through repeated reorganization, at first involving Russian participants, then re-formed under Chen Gongbo and Tan Pingshan, and at one point collapsed over internal differences before being rebuilt. There were also groups among Chinese students in Japan, associated with Shi Cuntong and Zhou Fohai, and in France, where Zhang Shenfu, Liu Qingyang and Zhou Enlai were active. The distinction matters for the congress itself: Zhou Fohai attended as the Japan group's man, while the France group sent no delegate at all.

In November 1920 the Shanghai initiating group drafted a Manifesto of the Chinese Communist Party, among the earliest surviving programmatic texts, declaring the aim of creating a new society on communist principles. It was not published; it circulated inside the groups as a standard for admitting members. The Shanghai group also opened a semi-public Foreign Languages School, which recruited young activists including Liu Shaoqi, Ren Bishi and Xiao Jingguang and sent them in the spring of 1921 to the Communist University of the Toilers of the East in Moscow. The pipeline — organize in Shanghai, train in Moscow — was therefore running before the party formally existed.

Money cannot be left out of the account. Research based on the Comintern archives shows that in 1921 and 1922 the Comintern and its Far Eastern organs supplied the Chinese party with funds and subsidies for publications and schools, channelled through Voitinsky, Maring and others. The totals differ from file to file, running from several hundred to over a thousand yuan a month depending on what is counted, and this page adopts no single figure as settled. Chen Duxiu's own report to the Comintern Executive in 1922 acknowledged that most of the party's operating funds came from the Comintern. That financial and organizational subordination formed part of the background when the Third Congress in 1923 accepted the Comintern's line on cooperation with the Nationalists.

The thirteen delegates can be named in full. From Shanghai, 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 students in Japan, Zhou Fohai; and Bao Huiseng, attending on Chen Duxiu's commission. They 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 they lodged at the Bowen Girls' School under the cover of a Peking University summer tour party. Li Da, his wife Wang Huiwu, and Li Hanjun handled notices, liaison and security.

The congress opened on the evening of 23 July 1921 in the residence of Li Shucheng, Li Hanjun's elder brother, at 106 Wangzhi Road in the French Concession, with Maring and Nikolsky present. Zhang Guotao reported on the preparations and chaired; Liu Renjing kept notes. The days that followed ran roughly as the surviving accounts agree: local reports on 24 July; a recess on 25 and 26 July while Li Hanjun, Dong Biwu, Liu Renjing, Zhang Guotao and Chen Gongbo drafted the program and resolutions; debate on the drafts from 27 to 29 July, sharp enough to leave marks in several memoirs, pitting Liu Renjing's insistence on immediate dictatorial action against Li Hanjun's case for study and legality, and dividing the room over whether members might sit in parliament or hold government office. On the evening of 30 July, while Maring was addressing the meeting, a stranger in a long gown pushed open the door, looked round the room, apologized for entering the wrong room and left. Maring, drawing on his experience of police work in the Dutch East Indies, judged the man a detective and ordered the meeting dispersed at once. Later investigation has commonly identified the intruder with Cheng Ziqing, an operative of the French Concession police; commonly identified is still an inference, and this page marks it as not fully proven. Detectives did search the Li house later that night and found nothing. Li Hanjun and Chen Gongbo, who had not left with the others, faced the search; Chen Gongbo departed for Guangzhou with his new wife the next day.

The final session took longer to fix in the record than any other detail of the congress. The remaining delegates — Chen Gongbo gone, Li Hanjun staying in Shanghai — took an early train to Jiaxing, where Wang Huiwu had hired a pleasure boat on South Lake and laid in food and wine. The meeting proceeded on the boat with Wang Huiwu at the bow keeping watch, humming, by her own later account, to warn the delegates when other boats came near. 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 as secretary in absentia, Zhang Guotao for organization, Li Da for propaganda. As to the date, party historians in the 1980s, cross-checking train records, weather reports and memoirs, gave the strongest support to 3 August, with 2 August also defended; official party history prudently says early August. This page follows that caution and treats the exact day as disputed.

The Program adopted by the congress survives only in Russian and English archival versions; the Chinese original is lost, and modern texts are retranslations. Its fifteen articles — one of them missing even in the archival copies — named the party, committed it to overthrowing the rule of the capitalist class by a revolutionary army, recognized the dictatorship of the proletariat until class distinctions were abolished, prescribed the abolition of capitalist private property and the confiscation of the means of production, and bound the party to unite with the Third International. The accompanying resolution directed the party's immediate work toward trade unions, workers' schools and workers' publications, and required members to sever relations with other political parties. Read plainly, the documents describe a Leninist party committed in principle to dictatorship and expropriation. They also describe a party of some fifty members with no army and no territory. The distance between the program of 1921 and the power of 1949 was closed by twenty-eight years of organization and war, and that distance is itself a central fact of the founding.

Chen Duxiu returned to Shanghai in September 1921 to take up the secretaryship he had been elected to in his absence. In October 1921 he was arrested by the French Concession police, with Yang Mingzhai, Zhang Guotao and others, over material published in New Youth, and was released after Comintern intervention and the payment of a fine — the first arrest of the party's principal leader on record. In July 1922 the Second Congress, meeting in Shanghai, formally resolved 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 correction that follows directly from the maximalism of 1921. In August 1922 Maring pressed the proposal that Communists join the Nationalist Party as individuals; at the West Lake meeting Chen Duxiu and others resisted and then submitted to the Comintern's decision, and the Third Congress of June 1923 formalized the united front. Only then did the party outgrow the scale of a circle: membership rose from just over 400 in 1923 to nearly 10,000 by 1925.

The later lives of the thirteen delegates amount to a compressed history of the early party, and they are recorded here one by one. Mao Zedong died in Beijing in 1976, the party's and the state's supreme leader for life. Dong Biwu died in Beijing in 1975, the only other delegate to travel the whole road from the First Congress to the founding of the state. He Shuheng, left behind in the Soviet area after the Long March, was killed in Fujian in 1935, surrounded by Nationalist troops; accounts differ on whether he fell by a bullet or by his own leap. Chen Tanqiu, the party's representative in Xinjiang, was secretly murdered by the warlord Sheng Shicai in 1943. Wang Jinmei died of tuberculosis in Qingdao in 1925, aged twenty-seven. Deng Enming was arrested in Jinan in 1928 and shot by the Nationalist authorities in Shandong in 1931. Li Da broke with Chen Duxiu over the united front and left the party in 1923, spent decades as a theorist and teacher, rejoined in 1949 on Mao's introduction, and was persecuted to death in the Cultural Revolution in 1966. Li Hanjun left in 1922 and was arrested and killed by Guangxi-clique forces in Wuhan in 1927. Liu Renjing was expelled in 1929 over Trotskyism and died in Beijing in 1987 after a difficult half-century. Chen Gongbo left in 1923, studied in America, rose high in Wang Jingwei's collaborationist regime, and was shot for treason at Suzhou in 1946. Zhou Fohai left in 1924, became vice-president of the Executive Yuan in the same regime, had a death sentence commuted in 1946, and died in a Nanjing prison in 1948. Bao Huiseng left after 1927, served for a time in the Nationalist government, and died in Beijing in 1957. Zhang Guotao defected at Wuhan in 1938 and died in exile in Toronto in 1979. Of thirteen men, four were killed by enemies of the party, one died young of disease, at least six left or were expelled, and two — Mao and Dong — remained inside it to the end.

The anniversary has a history of its own that an archive should state plainly. For years after 1921 the party had neither the leisure nor the security to mark its founding. In 1938 Mao, speaking at Yan'an, proposed 1 July as the anniversary; the only First Congress delegates then at Yan'an were Mao himself and Dong Biwu, and neither could recall the exact day, only the month. In 1941 the Central Committee formally fixed 1 July as the founding anniversary, the party's twentieth. The actual dates were recovered only after 1949, and confirmed in the 1980s when Comintern archival material and memoir evidence were collated: the congress had opened on 23 July. China thus keeps two dates in parallel, the commemoration on 1 July and the event on 23 July, and an archive page must not present the first as the second.

The Shanghai site was restored after 1949 and opened as a memorial in 1952, its address renumbered from 106 Wangzhi Road to 76 Xingye Road. The original South Lake boat no longer existed; the “Red Boat” moored at Jiaxing today is a 1959 reconstruction built to the remembered pattern, a fact stated in the Jiaxing memorial's own published introduction. Official commemoration dwells on the “Red Boat spirit” and for decades gave little space in its permanent displays to the full names and roles of Maring and Nikolsky or to Comintern financing, though recent exhibitions have added material. The evidentiary base for the congress remains what it has always been: no stenographic record was ever made, and the narrative rests on the delegates' memoirs, surviving correspondence, and the Comintern's Russian files. Every detail in this page that rests on memory alone should be read with that limitation in mind.

The party's growth after the First Congress can be set out in the figures given by the CCP's own organizational history materials: 195 members nationwide at the Second Congress in 1922; 420 at the Third in 1923; 994 at the Fourth in January 1925; about 10,000 by the end of 1925; and 57,967 at the Fifth Congress in April 1927. The curve establishes two facts. First, through 1921 to 1923 the party remained an organization of a few hundred men; it was the united front with the Nationalists, formalized at the Nationalists' First Congress in 1924, that carried it into mass politics, and the surge in membership came with the labour and peasant movements and the Northern Expedition. Second, the peak of the curve touches catastrophe. On 12 April 1927 Chiang Kai-shek purged the Communists in Shanghai; in July Wang Jingwei broke with them at Wuhan; the united front collapsed, the party went underground, and within a year its membership had fallen back to little over 10,000. The number killed in the White Terror is given very differently by the two sides' records: CCP party history puts those killed in 1927 and 1928 at more than 310,000, of whom over 26,000 were party members, a figure from the Communist side for which the Nationalist side published no counterpart total. On 7 August 1927 the Central Committee met in emergency session at Hankou, elected a provisional Politburo under Qu Qiubai, and adopted the line of agrarian revolution and armed resistance. The six years from the South Lake boat to the August Seventh Meeting are the whole passage from a party of studies to a party of armies; this page records the outline and leaves the detail to the related pages on this site.

Friction between Chen Duxiu and the Comintern surfaced immediately after the congress. At the end of 1921 Maring pressed for more direct Comintern supervision and monthly reporting; Chen's surviving letters to the Comintern's Far Eastern apparatus object openly to the accounting demands attached to the funds and to the reporting regime, and show a relationship already strained. Maring was twice expelled by the Shanghai concession authorities in 1922 and twice returned in secret. The friction was not temperament alone. Leninist discipline required a branch to obey the International; the intellectuals of Chen's generation had joined with a strong sense of independence; and the tension between those two facts, present from the party's second year, eventually detonated over responsibility for the failure of the revolution in 1927. The Comintern laid that failure on Chen's “right opportunism” and removed him as general secretary. In 1929, after he opposed the slogan of armed defence of the Soviet Union during the Chinese Eastern Railway crisis and moved toward the Trotskyist opposition, he was expelled from the party he had founded. Arrested by the Nationalist government in 1932, released in 1937, he died at Jiangjin in Sichuan in 1942, outside the party. The man elected secretary in his absence at the founding ended his life beyond its ranks, and the outcome is placed after the membership figures deliberately: from the beginning, this organization's history was written simultaneously as expansion and purge, obedience and expulsion.