8 “FOLLOWING THE RUSSIAN PATH”
Early on the morning of January 1, 1921, more than ten people gathered on the top floor of a small house in the center of Changsha at No. 56 Chaozong Street, the premises of the Cultural Book Society. Members of the quasi-legal Renovation of the People Study Society, they had assembled in response to a call from their leaders, He Shuheng and Mao Zedong. Over the next three days they discussed the following vital questions: What should be the general goal of the organization? What methods should they use to reach that goal, and what should they do to get started right away? The meeting was chaired by Bewhiskered He.
Mao Zedong was the first to speak. He said,
some members proposed organizing a Communist Party, while others wanted to practice a work-study philosophy and to transform education …… [T]here are two schools of thought in China today about how to resolve the problems of society. One advocates transformation, while the other wants reform. The former is that of Chen Duxiu and others; the latter is that of Liang Qichao, Zhang Dongsun [Liang Qichao's adherent] and others.1
The debate over the issues engendered heated disputes. Everyone understood that the future political program of the organization would depend on how the majority voted. The main question was whether to accept Bolshevism. The entire first morning was spent on discussion of general problems, and the meeting never got around to the core issue. At 11:30 A.M. the meeting broke up; the key disputes were carried over to the next day. At 9:00 A.M. on January 2, everyone was present, including some new people who had heard of the interesting discussion. Eighteen people were gathered in the room. Bewhiskered He again presided.
As the first order of business a majority voted to maintain the previous formulation of their general goal, which was “the transformation of China and the whole world.” Then they moved to the next item. Again Mao spoke first. He reminded everyone that in addition to the revolutionary Leninist solution there were other ways of addressing social problems including “social policy,” “social democracy,” “the moderate type of communism (the doctrine of Russell),” and “anarchism.” Then he suggested they go round the circle and take turns declaring themselves. “I advocate radicalism,” began Bewhiskered He. “One moment of upheaval is worth twenty years of education.” At once Mao supported his elder comrade:
Social policy is no method at all, because all it does is patch up some leaks. Social democracy resorts to a parliament as its tool for transforming things, but in reality the laws passed by a parliament always protect the propertied class. Anarchism rejects all authority, and I fear that such a doctrine can never be realized. The moderate type of communism, such as the extreme freedom advocated by Russell, lets the capitalists run wild, and therefore it will never work either. The radical type of communism, or the ideology of the workers and the peasants, which employs the method of class dictatorship, can be expected to achieve results. Hence it is the best method for us to use.
Most of those present agreed that the Russian variant of socialism should be adopted, because “in China, society [is] apathetic and human nature is degenerate …… Chinese society lacks organization and training.” The young Hunanese radicals favored the extreme formula “If the people are not able to make themselves happy, let's drag them into happiness with an iron hand.” In the end, twelve of the eighteen present voted for Bolshevism.2
Mao had reason to celebrate. He had played the key role in the creation of a communist organization in Changsha, but as often happens to many people, right after this success he fell into a depression. It appears that he had a nervous breakdown from the tension of the preceding few days. Earlier, too, he was given to self-analysis, and now he was in the depths of despair. In a letter to Peng Huang that he wrote at this low point, he discovered eight “defects” in himself that he believed would keep him from becoming a truly exceptional person, a great leader, which is what he had always passionately desired to be. These were his “defects”: 1) too emotional, always in the grip of feelings; 2) prone to subjective judgments; 3) somewhat vain; 4) too arrogant; 5) rarely self-analytic, too quick to blame others and unwilling to recognize his own blunders; 6) good at big talk, but weak in systematic analysis; 7) values himself too highly and is too facile in self-appraisal; 8) “weak-willed.”3 He was particularly ashamed to confess this last “very great defect,” because he had so assiduously cultivated an iron-willed spirit. Mao concluded his letter to his old friend with a frank admission that what motivated him was the fact that “I do not want to sacrifice my true self, I do not wish myself to turn myself into a puppet.”4 Mao's self-deprecation passed as quickly as it came. He never again doubted his right to power. The only surprising thing is that the letter has survived.
By the summer of 1921 there were already six communist cells in China. In addition to Shanghai, Beijing, and Changsha there were also party groups in Canton, Wuhan, and Jinan. A tiny cell was also organized in Japan by two members of the Shanghai circle who had gone there to study. Chen Duxiu circulated a letter to all these organizations to set “an agenda for a [united] conference as well as a time and place.”5 Shanghai was chosen as the venue for the founding congress of the Communist Party of China.
On June 3, 1921, a new Comintern representative arrived in China. Maring, the pseudonym under which he was listed in the Comintern Executive Committee archives, was a Dutch Jew from Rotterdam and one of the oldest activists in the Dutch social democratic and communist movements. The thirty-eight-year-old Maring, or Ma Lin as the Chinese called him, was known by many different names and had come to Shanghai as a Mr. Anderson. His real name was Sneevliet-Hendricus Josephus Franciscus Marie Sneevliet. Unlike Voitinsky, who had left China by this time, the new ECCI emissary was not known for his tact. He knew his own value as a special agent of Moscow, and he had walked the halls of the Kremlin with Lenin, Trotsky, and Zinoviev. He had already proven himself an outstanding labor organizer not only in the Netherlands, but also in Java, in the Dutch East Indies between 1913 and 1918. There he had been active in the initial stages of the Indonesian national liberation struggle. It was this experience that commended him to Comintern leaders. When he arrived in Moscow in June 1920 he was welcomed into important Kremlin offices, and at the Second Comintern Congress in July-August 1920, Maring served as secretary of the Commission on National and Colonial Questions. He was also chosen as a member of the ECCI, the leading organ of the Comintern, and easily outranked Voitinsky.
Maring was disliked by many Chinese communists because of his lack of civility. An elegant and rather pompous gentleman who dressed in a gray three-piece suit and bow tie, Maring reminded people of those same haughty colonialists against whom he himself had struggled. At least, this was the impression he made upon Zhang Guotao, who at their first meeting sized up this “foreign devil” as “aggressive and hard to deal with …… He saw himself coming as an angel of liberation to the Asian people. But …… he seemed endowed with the social superiority complex of the white man.”6
Vladimir Neiman (alias Vasilii Berg), another Soviet emissary, known in China as Nikolsky, arrived with his wife in Shanghai from Irkutsk as an agent of the Far Eastern Secretariat of ECCI, the special regional organ of the Communist International that had been established in January 1921.7 Chen Duxiu, however, was not in Shanghai. In December 1920, he had accepted an invitation from the southern Chinese militarist Chen Jiongming, who had seized power in Guangdong province two months earlier, to assume the chairmanship of the Guangdong Provincial Education Committee in Canton. For tactical reasons General Chen Jiongming was masquerading as a liberal and swearing his fealty to democracy. He succeeded in fooling not only Professor Chen, but also Sun Yat-sen, who had returned to China after more than two and a half years of exile in Japan only after the death of Yuan Shikai in June 1916. Sun had settled in Canton. Meanwhile, the new president of China, General Li Yuanhong, who initially had tried to restore the constitution that his predecessor had trampled upon, under pressure from northern militarists had himself dissolved the parliament. In June 1917, exasperated by the conduct of the president, the deputies started gathering in Canton where they rallied around Sun Yat-sen and reconstituted the parliament in September 1917. A dual power formally came into being in the country. (In reality, as we know, the situation was much more complicated. China disintegrated, and every local militarist considered himself de facto independent.) On October 3, 1917, Sun was chosen as the generalissimo of South China. But this time, too, lacking an army of his own, he was soon forced to retire to Shanghai at the insistence of yet another militarist. There he stayed until November 1920, when Chen Jiongming, a member of Sun's own party, who had seized power in Canton in late October, invited the hapless generalissimo to return. On April 7, 1921, Sun was proclaimed the extraordinary president of the Republic of China. In reality, he only controlled Canton and environs. Proclaiming himself a revolutionary, Chen Jiongming even managed to fool the worldly wise agents of the Communist International, including Voitinsky.8 (Not a year and a half would pass before, in June 1922, Chen Jiongming would rebel against the unfortunate Sun Yat-sen, forcing the latter to flee once more to Shanghai two months later.)
For the time being, however, it seemed that a new era had dawned in Canton, which is why Chen Duxiu had accepted Chen Jiongming's offer to serve in his government. Following a proposal by the ECCI representatives, it was decided to hold the founding congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) without Chen. Li Dazhao, burdened with work at Beida, also could not come to Shanghai, but even this did not bother Maring and Nikolsky. In June 1921, a member of the Shanghai communist nucleus, Li Da, substituting for Chen Duxiu, sent a notice to all communist organizations throughout the country inviting them each to send two representatives to the congress in Shanghai.9 Soon after, on July 9, Maring sent a secret dispatch to Moscow: “I hope that the conference that we intend to convene at the end of July will prove very useful to our work. The small groups of comrades will be united. After this we can begin centralized work.”10 By July 23, everything was ready. Twelve delegates, two each from Shanghai, Beijing, Wuhan, Changsha, and Jinan, and one each from Canton and Tokyo, assembled. Among them were Mao Zedong and Bewhiskered He.
Mao and He left Changsha by steamer on the evening of June 29 and arrived in Shanghai a week later. They were met by the Shanghai liaison, Li Da's wife, Wang Huiwu, who was in charge of making arrangements for the delegates. She put up the delegates in the empty dormitory of the Bowen Women's Lycée in the French Concession. The director was her acquaintance, a Mrs. Huang Shaolan, who suspected nothing and was glad to get some extra income. Wang Huiwu told her that a group of professors and students in town for a scholarly symposium needed temporary quarters. The visiting “professors and students” slept on the floor because there were no beds in the dormitory.11
Fifteen people participated in the congress, which opened on July 23 in another room of this same dormitory.12 In addition to the twelve delegates, Maring and Nikolsky attended along with Bao Huisen, a special representative from Chen Duxiu. Two days after the congress opened it was shifted to the nearby home of Li Hanjun, one of the participants. Maring chose this place for reasons of security. Li Hanjun was the younger brother of Liu Shucheng, one of the wealthiest persons in Shanghai. The families of Liu and Li owned two adjoining private houses in the French Concession. The sessions of the founding congress of the CCP continued in No. 106 Wangzhilu (it is also No. 3 Shudelu Lane). Maring hoped that secret agents would not poke their noses in there. Li Hanjun's house is now the Museum of the First Congress of the CCP.
At the end of July 1921, the prospects for a rapid seizure of power in China were nil. At the time there were only fifty-three people in the ranks of the CCP.13 Those assembled in Li Hanjun's house could only dimly discern the contours of the future bloody battles for a socialist revolution. Zhang Guotao, a delegate from Beijing whom we have already encountered, was chosen as chair of the congress.14 Mao Zedong and Zhou Fohai, who had come from Japan, were asked to serve as secretaries. Busy with matters of protocol, Mao was not very active. He spoke only once, delivering a brief report on the Bolshevik group in Changsha. According to Zhang Guotao's reminiscences, Mao was “pale-faced,” but he displayed a “rather lovely temperament …… [I]n his long gown of native cloth [he] looked like a Taoist [Daoist] priest out of some village. His fund of general knowledge was considerable …… A good talker, Mao loved an argument, and while conversing, he delighted in laying verbal traps into which his opponents would unwittingly fall by seeming to contradict themselves. Then, obviously happy, he would burst into laughter.”15
Zhang, along with Li Hanjun, Bao Huisen, and Liu Renjing, displayed the greatest enthusiasm. A majority of the congress with the exception of their host stood firmly for the dictatorship of the proletariat as the central tenet of their new faith. The cautious Li Hanjun, who was quite familiar with Marx's economic teachings and, therefore, advised against trying to expedite a socialist revolution in a backward country, was quickly overwhelmed. The “pure breath” of Bolshevism emanates from the congress documents that were prepared by an editorial committee. The programmatic principles of the CCP were defined as follows:
A. With the revolutionary army of the proletariat to overthrow the capitalist classes, to reconstruct the nation from the labor class, until class distinctions are eliminated.
B. To adopt the dictatorship of the proletariat in order to complete the end of class struggle-abolishing the classes.
C. To overthrow the private ownership of capital, to confiscate all the productive means, such as machines, land, buildings, semi-manufactured products, etc., and to entrust them to social ownership.
D. To unite with the Third [i.e., Communist] International.16
This course also defined the tactical line endorsed at the congress: “Our Party, with the adoption of the Soviet form, organizes the industrial and agricultural laborers and soldiers, preaches communism, and recognizes the social revolution as our chief policy; absolutely cuts off all relations with the yellow intellectual class, and other such parties.”17
The latter thesis was further developed in the “Decision as to the Objects of Communist Party of China”:
Towards the existing political parties, an attitude of independence, aggression and exclusion should be adopted. In the political struggle, in opposition to militarism and bureaucracy and in demanding freedom of speech, press, and assemblage, when we must declare our attitude, our party should stand up in behalf of the proletariat, and should allow no relationship with the other parties or groups.18
The members of the Communist Party also adopted this isolationist position with regard to the Chinese nationalist revolutionaries headed by Sun Yat-sen. The delegates of the congress emphasized that Sun's government in Canton was no better than the government of the northern militarists,19 despite the fact that Chen Duxiu was one of its ministers. This assertion of “revolutionary purity” demonstrates just how much these leftist Chinese radicals, who had just officially broken with liberalism, wanted to declare their ideological and organizational autonomy.
Even Maring and Nikolsky were giddy with revolutionary fervor. Maring spoke about his activity in Java, which involved promoting cooperation between the Social Democratic Association of the Dutch East Indies and local nationalists.20 He explained that there are many different kinds of democrats, and to bolster his point of view he cited the basic resolutions on the national and colonial questions adopted at the Second Comintern Congress one year earlier.21 As early as late November 1919, Lenin and other revolutionary leaders in Moscow realized that the attempt to disseminate Bolshevik theories beyond the eastern borders of Soviet Russia faced serious obstacles. Apart from a small number of leftist radicals, it seemed that no one in the East was eager to embrace Bolshevism. Most intellectuals adhered to nationalist views. The ideas of nationalism, rather than the abstract idea of internationalism that the Comintern supported, were also more easily accepted by the masses.
By the summer of 1920, Lenin understood that “pure” Bolshevik tactics aimed at preparing for socialist revolution were unlikely to be successful in the East. This forced the Russian communists to consider how to adapt their theories to countries that were even more backward industrially than Russia or that were either colonies or semi-colonies. They began to view world socialist revolution not only, or not so much, as the struggle “of revolutionary proletarians in all countries against their own bourgeoisie,” but as rather the struggle “of all the oppressed people in all the colonies, countries, and dependencies against international imperialism.”22 Such thinking was incorporated into the new Comintern policy in China based on the theory of anticolonial revolution that Lenin had formulated in 1920.
In essence Lenin argued that the precondition for the emancipation of the working masses-mostly peasants-of industrially backward colonial and semi-colonial countries of the East was the overthrow of foreign imperialist domination in these countries. Revolutions in the East, therefore, including China, would be nationalist, not socialist, in nature. In order to garner significant popular following, local communists would have to support the bourgeois liberation movements of colonial and dependent nations. By participating in these democratic movements rather than isolating themselves, the communists should assume the leadership of the masses, and transform the nationalist movements into revolutions of a new type by propagating the idea of peasant soviets and soviets of exploited workers. Where conditions allow, they should attempt to establish soviets of the working people.
Speaking at the Second Comintern Congress in 1920, Lenin emphasized the temporary and purely tactical character of the new course. He asserted that the communists should provide support only to genuine nationalist revolutionaries. Such persons would allow the communists to educate and organize the broad masses in a more revolutionary, that is, communist, spirit, and support their struggle against landlords and all manifestations of feudalism. Lenin insisted upon preserving the organizational independence of the proletarian movement, even in its rudimentary form. He added that if the “bourgeois democrats” impede the communists' organizational work then the communists would have to struggle against them.23 In plain English, it meant that we will support the national revolutionaries, but only when they do not get in the way of our organizing the masses to struggle against these very same national revolutionaries. Linked to this concept was the idea that the victory of anticolonial revolution in the countries of the East would switch them onto some sort of “noncapitalist” path of development.
Maring tried to convey all of this esoteric theorizing to the assembled delegates, emphasizing that the policies of the Bolsheviks in China must be flexible, but his speech made no impression upon them. They found it extraordinarily difficult to understand the need simultaneously to grasp the theory of class conflict of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie and the concept of anti-imperialist cooperation. They also were unable to comprehend that all of Bolshevism was founded on a lie. For the time being the “right to dishonesty” preached by the apologists of Leninism confused them. They were attracted to communism largely by its revolutionary allure, the romanticism of class conflict, and its egalitarian ideals.
The congress participants were ready to sum things up when suddenly, on the evening of July 30, a middle-aged man in a black robe looked in on the room where they were meeting. Asked to identify himself, the stranger muttered something about looking for the director of a publishing house, a Mr. Wang. (Wang, the most common surname in China, is the equivalent of Smith in America). He vanished at once, but Maring was very agitated and ordered everyone to disperse. Only the host and his friend Chen Gongbo, the delegate from Canton, remained. Not a quarter of an hour passed before the French police burst into the house. “Who is the owner?” asked the inspector in French. “I am,” replied Li Hanjun, who knew French quite well.
“Who was at the meeting in your house?”
“There was no meeting,” Li objected. “A few professors from Peking University were discussing plans of the New Epoch publisher.” (Such a publisher really had existed since June 1921; it was legal and officially had no relationship with the communists, although it was secretly financed by the Comintern.)
“Why are there so many books in this house?”
“I am a teacher. I need these books for my work.”
“Why do you have so many books about socialism?”
“I work concurrently as an editor. Whatever they send me I read.”
“There were two foreigners here. Who were they?”
“Two Englishmen, professors from Beida. They came here on summer vacation and dropped in to chat.”
Then the inspector began to interrogate Chen Gongbo in English. Chen did not know French.
“Are you Japanese?” he asked for some reason.
“No,” replied Chen. “I came from Guangdong.”
“Why did you come to Shanghai?”
“I am a professor at the Guangdong Institute of Jurisprudence. It's my summer vacation, and I came to Shanghai to have a good time.”
“Where are you staying?”
“Here.”
Hanging around a while longer, the police conducted a search of the house, but evidently they didn't try very hard, because they found nothing. This saved Li Hanjun and Chen Gongbo. In one of the drawers in Li's bedroom desk was a draft of the “Program for the Communist Party of China.”
Late at night the conspirators gathered at the home of Chen Duxiu, where Li Da and Wang Huiwu were staying. It was understood that continuing the congress in Shanghai was impossible. Mao thought that they needed to go somewhere far away, but Wang Huiwu proposed that they relocate to her native town of Jiaxing, on the shore of Lake Nanhu, about thirty-five miles to the south, in Zhejiang province. There they could rent a boat and hold the final session on the lake. Almost everyone agreed, but for various reasons several people decided not to go. Chen Gongbo, for example, was terribly frightened. He had come to Shanghai with his young wife, and now it seemed their honeymoon might have a tragic ending. After talking it over with Li Da, he and his wife promptly departed for several days to Hangzhou, in Zhejiang province, more than one hundred miles south of Shanghai. Because the police were watching his house Li Hanjun could not leave the city. Maring and Nikolsky also decided not to go outside of Shanghai, so as not to draw attention to themselves.
The next day, July 31, the remaining participants in the forum, including Mao, set out by train for Jiaxing, accompanied by Wang Huiwu. Mao's old friend Xiao Yu, who was in Shanghai and had heard about the congress from Mao, decided to see how things would wind up. Wang put everyone up in an expensive local hotel with a name that was quite inappropriate for the occasion-Happy Couples. They also rented a boat from this hotel. After washing up and eating breakfast, Mao and the others, minus Xiao Yu, went out on the lake around 10 A.M. The boat was quite roomy and had a large cabin. They all seated themselves and headed for the middle of the lake. They were in luck. The weather was not very good and it was drizzling, so there were very few vacationers out on the water. After lunch almost no one was around.
In the absence of the Comintern representatives the delegates adopted a program, a Decision about the Objectives of the CCP, and a manifesto all in extreme leftist, ultrarevolutionary versions. It seems they felt like heroes and feared no one. Then they unanimously selected Chen Duxiu as secretary of the Central Bureau of the party. (In 1922 the position of secretary was changed to chairman of the Central Executive Committee, and in 1925 was renamed general secretary of the CEC; Chen Duxiu would occupy this position until July 1927.) Two more persons were chosen for the Central Bureau: Zhang Guotao in charge of organizational work, and Li Da in charge of propaganda. In Chen Duxiu's absence, the duties of secretary were assigned to Zhou Fohai.
It was already 6 P.M., but nobody wanted to return to shore. Sitting in the boat, the young people shouted out, “Long live the Chinese Communist Party! Long live the Third International! Long live communism, the liberator of humankind!”24 We do not know whether there was an answering echo.
1 Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 2, 61.
2 Ibid., 67-70.
3 Ibid., 37-38.
4 Ibid., 38. Bold in the original.
5 Titarenko, VKP(b), Komintern i Kitai: Dokumenty (The CPSU, the Comintern and China: Documents), vol. 1, 27.
6 Chang, The Rise of the Chinese Communist Party, vol. 1, 137, 139.
7 Titarenko, VKP(b), Komintern i Kitai: Dokumenty (The CPSU, the Comintern and China: Documents), vol. 1, 743.
8 Ibid., 60.
9 See Shanghai diqu jiandang huodong yanjiu ziliao (Materials for the Study of Party Building in the Shanghai Region) (Shanghai: Shanghai shi diyi renmin jingcha xuexiao, 1986), 120; Pang, Mao Zedong nianpu, 1893-1949 (Chronological Biography of Mao Zedong, 1893-1949), vol. 1, 84.
10 Quoted from M. A. Persits, “Iz istorii stanovleniia Kommunisticheskoi partii Kitaia (Doklad podgotovlennyi Chzhang Taileem dlia III Kongressa Kominterna kak istoricheskii istochnik)” (From the History of the Founding of the Communist Party of China [Zhang Tailei's Report to the Third Congress of the Comintern as an Historical Source]), Narody Azii i Afriki (Peoples of Asia and Africa), no. 4 (1971): 51
11 See Shanghai diqu jiandang huodong yanjiu ziliao (Materials for the Study of Party Building in the Shanghai Region), 120-21; Chen Gongbo and Zhou Fohai, Chen Gongbo, Zhou Fohai huiyilu (Reminiscences of Chen Gongbo, Zhou Fohai) (Hong Kong: Chunqiu chubanshe, 1988), 116.
12 Shanghai diqu jiandang huodong yanjiu ziliao (Materials for the Study of Party Building in the Shanghai Region), 131.
13 See “Novye materialy o pervom s”ezde Kommunisticheskoi partii Kitaia” (New Materials on the First Congress of the Communist Party of China), Narody Azii i Afriki (Peoples of Asia and Africa), no. 6 (1972): 151.
14 Chang and Halliday write that Zhang Guotao had been chosen because “he had been to Russia and had links with the foreigners.” Chang and Halliday, Mao, 26. This is untrue. Zhang Guotao first visited Russia only half a year after the founding congress of the CCP. As for “the foreigners” (emissaries of the Comintern?) his ties with them were no greater than those of the majority of the other delegates. He was chosen as chair of the congress because he had been particularly active prior to the first session.
15 Chang, The Rise of the Chinese Communist Party, vol. 1, 140, 141.
16 C. Martin Wilbur, ed., The Communist Movement in China: An Essay Written in 1924 by Ch'en Kung-po (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), 106.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid., 109.
19 Ibid., 83.
20 See “Kongress Kommunisticheskoi partii v Kitae” (Congress of the Communist Party of China), Narody Azii i Afriki (Peoples of Asia and Africa), no. 6 (1972): 151-52.
21 See Shen Dechun and Tian Haiyan, “Zhongguo gongchandang ‘Yi Da' de zhuyao wenti” (Main Questions Connected to the First Congress of the Communist Party of China), Renmin ribao (People's daily), June 30, 1961
22 V. I. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Complete Collected Works), vol. 39 (Moscow: Politizdat, 1974), 327.
23 V. I. Lenin, Selected Works, vol. 10 (New York: International, 1943), 231-44.
24 “Kongress Kommunisticheskoi partii v Kitae” (Congress of the Communist Party in China), 153. See also Shanghai diqu jiandang huodong yanjiu ziliao (Materials for the Study of Party Building in the Shanghai Region), 9, 122-24; Wu, Mao Zedong guanghui licheng dituji (Atlas of Mao Zedong's Glorious Historical Path), 23; Chen and Zhou, Chen Gongbo, Zhou Fohai huiyilu (Reminiscences of Chen Gongbo and Zhou Fohai), 40, 117; Chang, The Rise of the Chinese Communist Party, vol. 1, 136-52; Qiwu, Do i posle obrazovaniia Kommunisticheskoi partii Kitaia (Before and After the Establishment of the Communist Party of China), 117-27; Chen Pang-qu (Chen Tanqu), “Vospominaniia o I s”ezde Kompartii Kitaia” (Reminiscences of the First Congress of the CCP), Kommunisticheskii Internatsional (Communist International), no. 14 (1936): 96-99; Siao-yu, Mao Tse-tung and I Were Beggars, 196-203. Chang and Halliday ignore these generally known facts and assert that the CCP was founded not at its founding congress in July 1921, but a year earlier, in August 1920. See Chang and Halliday, Mao, 19. They do so, in their own words, in order to explode the “myth” that Mao Zedong was one of the founders of the party. But what was founded in the summer of 1920 was not the party, but only the first, Shanghai, communist circle.