9 THE LESSONS OF BOLSHEVIK TACTICS
That the delegates at the congress had acted contrary to the directives of the Comintern representatives reached Maring's ears at once. He refused to tolerate disobedience from a bunch of political adolescents. Thus he demanded that Chen Duxiu quickly return to Shanghai and assume direct leadership of the party.1 Even though Chen had his own plan—he was thinking of moving CCP headquarters to Canton 2 - he was compelled to submit. In September 1921 he resigned his post as chairman of the Guangdong Provincial Education Committee and came to Shanghai.
Meanwhile, Maring, ignoring the resolutions of the CCP Congress, left for South China to gauge the prospects for organizing an anti-imperialist united front between the CCP and Sun Yat-sen. At the end of December 1921 he met with Sun in Guilin, in Guangxi province.3 They discussed the possibility of establishing a secret alliance between the Guomindang and Soviet Russia. Moreover, Maring proposed reorienting the Guomindang to support the masses, establishing a school to train military cadres for the Chinese revolution, and transforming the Guomindang into a strong political party that would bring together representatives of various sectors of society. He delivered a speech about Soviet Russia to military officers who were loyal to Sun.
Maring's conversations with Sun and other Guomindang leaders, as well as with Chen Jiongming, and his new knowledge of the Guomindang's achievements in organizing the workers' movement strengthened his resolve to steer the CCP leaders away from their “exclusive attitude towards the KMT [Guomindang].” A more cooperative stance toward the Guomindang would make it easier for the CCP to forge ties with the workers and soldiers of South China, where Sun Yat-sen's supporters held power. Maring emphasized that the CCP did not have to “give up its independence, on the contrary, the comrades must together decide which tactics they should follow within the KMT …… The prospects for propaganda by the small groups [of communists], as long as they are not linked to the KMT, are dim,” he concluded.4 Maring's initiative to have communists enter the Guomindang was approved by Sun Yat-sen and several other Guomindang leaders, who assured him that they would not obstruct communist propaganda inside their own party. However, Sun Yat-sen was pessimistic about the prospects for interparty cooperation between the Guomindang and the CCP.5
Returning to Shanghai, Maring related his conversations with Sun to the leaders of the CCP and advised them to consider his new proposal for developing the CCP within the Guomindang. Maring's proposition horrified Chen Duxiu and the other CCP leaders. Indeed, it was dead on arrival, as Chen Duxiu immediately notified Voitinsky, who was in Moscow at the time.6 Infuriated by Chen's action, Maring left for Moscow at the end of April 1922 to complain. He didn't even bother to say good-bye to any of his Chinese acquaintances, except for his short-term Shanghai girlfriend.7
In the disputes about a united front Mao Zedong stood foursquare with his teacher Professor Chen as did all the other communists from Changsha. The party cells in Guangdong, Shanghai, Beijing, and Hubei—the overwhelming majority of Chinese Bolsheviks—rejected any form of cooperation with the Guomindang.8 Their main goal was to establish their own party organizations and develop a workers' movement under the aegis of the Communist Party.
After he arrived in Changsha, Mao too became active in party and trade union organizing. He returned home only in mid-August, having stopped for several days in Nanjing, where Tao Yi was taking preparatory courses at Southeastern University.9 (There is no way of knowing whether Kaihui's suspicions that her husband was still having an affair with Tao Yi had any foundation.) In Changsha he quickly established the Hunan branch of the All-China Workers' Secretariat, whose headquarters had just been established in Shanghai according to a resolution of the founding congress of the CCP.10 He immediately contacted the local anarchists who were the true pioneers of the workers' movement in Hunan. Their leaders were Huang Ai and Pang Renquan; the union they had organized in November 1920 was the Labor Association. The anarchists published a popular journal, the Laogong zhoukan (Labor weekly). Workers who had participated in a two-thousand-person strike at the No. 1 Cotton Mill in Changsha in April 1921 were among their most active members.11
Understanding that he could not possibly compete with such an influential union, Mao did the only sensible thing under the circumstances: he tried to win over Huang and Pang to his side. At the end of November 1921, Mao wrote an article for the anarchist journal under the revealing title “My Hopes for the Labor Association,” in which he brazenly declared that he had sympathized with this organization for a year already, and then he tried to push his Bolshevik ideas: “The purpose of a labor organization is not merely to rally the laborers to get better pay and shorter working hours by means of strikes. It should also nurture class consciousness so as to unite the whole class and seek the basic interests of the working class. I hope that every member of the Labor Association will pay special attention to this basic goal.”12
Using flattery and persuasion, Mao ultimately induced Huang Ai and Pang Renquan to join the Socialist Youth League in December 1921, but in January 1922, both leaders of the Labor Association were seized by thugs working for Zhao Hengti and executed on the charge of “buying firearms, colluding with bandits, and agitating for a strike at the mint at the end of the year when any stoppage of work was simply out of the question, as the copper money to be coined in the mint was required for the soldiers' pay and rations.”13 The executions of Huang and Pang played into Mao's hands. Only now was the Hunan branch of the All-China Secretariat of Trade Unions (formally Workers' Secretariat) able to take charge of the workers' movement in the province.
The individual who assisted Mao greatly in organizing communist unions was his old acquaintance Li Lisan, the same shy young man who in the autumn of 1915 had been unable to overcome his embarrassment before the “omniscient” student from the Provincial First Normal School and had not joined Mao's circle for that reason. Since then Li had had many experiences. He had seen the world as a member of the Diligent Work and Frugal Study movement in France, had sampled socialist ideas, and, after returning to Changsha in November 1921, had turned up at Mao's house, where he was greeted cordially. In France Li had befriended Cai Hesen, and this was enough for Mao to change his opinion of Li. “A guest returns to Dongting Lake,” he said in greeting Li Lisan, inviting him to continue the poetic stanza he had begun. This was the custom that existed among educated persons at the beginning of the century. “At Xiao and Xiang I come upon an old friend,” Li replied elegantly.14
They did not become friends, but for a time they developed comradely relations. Entering the Communist Party soon thereafter, Li proved to be a passionate orator and a resolute man very popular among workers. In late December 1921, Mao and Li traveled together to the coal mines at Anyuan, located in western Jiangxi province near the border with Hunan, to launch a workers' movement. Seeing a great opportunity, Mao asked Li to remain in Anyuan to undertake the organization of the local workers, which he did.15
Meanwhile, Mao focused on organizing unions in Changsha and other cities in Hunan. Under Marx's influence, Mao at this time considered workers to be the main force of the future revolution, and he was not at all disconcerted that there was virtually no industrial working class in his native province. In all of Hunan there were only three large industrial enterprises, and in one of these, the First Silk Factory, a significant percentage of those employed were children between the ages of nine and fifteen. There were also small nonferrous metal workshops, but these employed very few workers. Most of the workers whom the Chinese communists initially considered the working class were temporary or seasonal laborers in the handicrafts industry who had only recently arrived from the countryside, along with coolies and rickshaw pullers. From Mao's perspective, generally, “most people are workers who work with their hands or their minds.”16 Of course, in a strictly sociological sense, this was not so.
By the middle of 1923, Mao and his comrades had succeeded in organizing twenty-two trade unions, many of which were called workers' clubs, consisting of miners, railway workers, typographers, municipal service workers and employees of the mint, rickshaw pullers, barbers, and others.17 In eight of these unions Mao was chosen as secretary.18 In all, these organizations included about 30,000 people, although the majority of the unions were quite small and bore no comparison to the Anyuan workers' club founded by Li Lisan. At a time when the latter, established on May 1, 1922, numbered 11,000 members, the strongest of the Changsha unions, the Rickshaw Pullers Union, had only about 2,000.19 Nonetheless, under the influence of communist propaganda all these unions actively engaged in class struggle. In Changsha and elsewhere, in early 1922 “a vigorous labor movement began,” Mao Zedong recalled.20 It reached its peak in the autumn of 1922, when, according to Mao's figures, more than 22,000 workers took part in strikes.21
Mao was directly involved in the overwhelming majority of these strikes. He rushed about all over northeastern Hunan and western Jiangxi, often accompanied by his pregnant wife, Kaihui, who had joined the CCP in 1921. He gave speeches in workers' auditoriums at the lead and zinc mine at Shuikoushan, the Anyuan coal mine, the Xinhe and Yuezhou railroad stations, and at factories in Changsha and Hengyang.22 He also drew his own relatives into the workers' movement. In addition to Kaihui he was assisted by his younger brother Zetan, who had been living with him in Changsha since 1918; his second cousin Zejian; and a girlfriend of Zetan's, Zhao Xiangui. At the end of 1921, Mao persuaded Zetan, who was studying at a primary school attached to the Provincial First Normal School, and his second cousin Zejian, who was attending a municipal girls' school in Changsha, to join the Socialist Youth League. In March 1923, Mao sent Zetan to the workers' club at the Shuikoushan lead and zinc mine, where he joined the CCP in October. Returning to Changsha later in the year, Zetan became the secretary of the municipal committee of the Chinese Socialist Youth League. Then, in 1923, Mao Zejian and Zhao Xiangui also joined the party. Zhao married Zetan the following year.23
Even the middle brother, Zemin, who had always been distinguished by his sobriety and good sense, and on whom had rested the entire burden of the household in Shaoshan after the death of their father, succumbed to his older brother's blandishments. He rented out all his land, left his home, and in February 1921 came to Changsha, where he plunged into politics. Mao arranged for Zemin to be the bursar in the primary school attached to the First Normal School that he himself directed at the time, and gave him a room in a dormitory. Through many long evenings Mao explained the ABC's of politics to Zemin and his young wife, Wang Shulan. In the fall of 1922 Zemin joined the CCP and soon thereafter Mao sent him off to Li Lisan, at the Anyuan colliery. There the thrifty Zemin served as director of the miners' consumer co-op. Unfortunately, Shulan could not accompany her husband: half a year earlier, on May 5, 1922, she had given birth to a daughter. Thus Mao acquired a niece, Mao Yuanzhi, and since that time Shulan had lived permanently in Shaoshan.24
Under Mao's direction, many Hunanese communists were engaged in agitation among the working people and in organizing trade unions. Their efforts bore fruit. Nine out of ten large-scale strikes that took place in 1922 and the first half of 1923 ended in the complete or partial victory of the workers. The strikes on the Wuchang–Changsha and Zhuzhou–Pingxiang railroads were particularly powerful, as was the strike at the Anyuan mines, which took place in September.
The overwhelming majority of strikes were economic in nature. The strikers demanded an eight-hour day, higher wages, and improved working conditions. They asked for nothing out of the ordinary. Life for them was unbearable. Workers toiled for twelve to thirteen hours a day, lived in filthy barracks, and were paid a pittance. They had no interest in politics and no intention of overthrowing anyone. Quite the contrary. One of their most popular demands was the establishment of so-called arbitration commissions to resolve disputes with the entrepreneurs under the aegis of the authorities.25 The strikes were usually quite peaceful; rarely did they lead to bloody clashes with the bosses.
These successes strengthened Mao's influence among the workers. The authority of the Hunan branch of the All-China Secretariat of Trade Unions grew correspondingly. On November 5, 1922, a broader organization, the Hunan Federation of Trade Unions (HFTU), was established on its foundation with Mao as its general secretary.26 Now even Governor Zhao Hengti had to reckon with him. In mid-December, Mao, representing the HFTU, met with the governor for an hour and a half to discuss several urgent problems, primarily economic in nature, affecting workers. The upshot was that Zhao was forced to recognize the constitutional right of workers to organize and to strike. Mao immediately published a report on this meeting in Justice.27
What Mao and his comrades failed to do was to instill a communist consciousness in the minds of the workers. Even though Mao declared in his meeting with the governor that “what the workers wished for was socialism, because socialism was really beneficial to them,” this was not so.28 The same situation prevailed everywhere in China, including Shanghai. Chen Duxiu reported to Moscow, “The majority of the workers are artisans who still work in old craft shops …… They are apolitical. The number of modern workers is very small …… If we try talking to them about socialism and communism, they are scared off …… Only a handful of them enter our party and then only because of ties of friendship. Even fewer understand what communism and the communist party are.”29
Mao was eager to radicalize the labor movement, but nothing came of his efforts. Nevertheless, doggedly persisting in his efforts to unite the workers' daily struggle with opposition to the militarist regime, Mao believed that the governor of Hunan had “betrayed all the ideas he had supported, and especially he violently suppressed all demands for democracy.”30 This despite the fact that Zhao Hengti tolerated him, allowed him to publish, received Mao at his residence, and when he met with Mao even stated that “socialism might be realized in the future.”31 Unable to rely upon the labor movement to oppose the governor, Mao made use of the provincial party and Socialist Youth League organizations that he devoted great efforts to building up.
Officially, the Hunan committee of the CCP was established on October 10, 1921, which, according to the calendar adopted after the 1911 Revolution, was the tenth day of the tenth month of the tenth year of the republic. Naturally, Mao was chosen as secretary. The party committee was located at his house in the suburb of Qingshuitang, not far from the eastern railroad station. At the end of May 1922, upon the motion of the Central Bureau of the CCP, a Special Xiang District Committee was formed, uniting the more than 30 communists from Hunan and western Jiangxi. Mao also became the secretary of this committee.32 He also headed the Executive Committee of the Socialist Youth League of Changsha, which was established in mid-June 1922.33 Thus he concentrated in his own hands the leadership of the underground Bolshevik movement in the region. Soon CCP and Chinese Socialist Youth League cells existed in a number of schools in Changsha as well as in the cities of Hengyang, Pingjiang, Changde, and in the Anyuan colliery.34 In all of them the “iron will” of the rising communist leader was evident. By November 1922, there were already 230 communists and young socialists in Hunan at a time when there were only 110 in Shanghai. There were even fewer, only 40, in Canton, 20 in Jinan, and 15 in the eastern province of Anhui.35
Obviously, Mao had too much to handle. He still hoped to go study in Russia36 in three or four years, but he was inundated with work. Instead of learning Marxism himself, he had to teach others. In August 1921, he and Bewhiskered He founded a school in Changsha to train cadres for the Communist Party. The school operated legally under the title of Self-Study University, and with the help of local intellectuals Mao even succeeded in getting a subsidy of some four hundred Chinese dollars from the hated Zhao Hengti's government.37 Mao became the general manager and his brother Zemin served as bursar. Both of them resigned their positions at the primary school attached to the First Normal School.38
Meanwhile, significant political changes were taking place in the Chinese Communist Party. In early 1922, a number of Chinese political figures accepted an invitation from the Bolshevik leadership to visit Moscow and Petrograd. Among them were five delegates to the First CCP Congress, including Zhang Guotao and Bewhiskered He. They attended the first Congress of the Peoples of the Far East, which was sponsored by the Comintern. The congress, dedicated to the problems of a national united front in the colonies and semi-colonies, had an enormous impact upon the Chinese communists. The Comintern leaders impressed on the minds of the delegates the idea of cooperation between communists and nationalist revolutionaries. The chairman of the Executive Committee of the Comintern, Grigorii Zinoviev, was particularly impassioned. He flatly asserted that the Chinese, Korean, and Japanese communists “were a very small group for now” and therefore they had to “not stand apart, not look down on those sinners and publicans who had not yet become communists, but to get into the thick of things, to engage the tens of millions of people who were struggling in China, people who were struggling for national independence and emancipation.”39 This was Lenin's message, too. He met with a group of congress delegates including Zhang Guotao, another communist named Deng Pei, and Guomindang representative Zhang Qiubai. Lenin raised the possibility of cooperation between the Guomindang and the Chinese Communist Party, and elicited the views of Zhang Qiubai and Zhang Guotao on this issue.40
Of course, the leaders of the CCP had to reconsider. Zinoviev and Lenin were not the likes of Maring. They were leaders, teachers, mentors. Therefore, Zhang Guotao, He Shuheng, and the other communists at the forum voted for the “Manifesto of the Congress of the Peoples of the Far East” that contained a call for the unity of all anti-imperialist revolutionary forces.41 Returning to China in March 1922, Zhang Guotao informed the Central Bureau of the CCP about the results of his trip:
[M]ost leaders in Moscow thought that the Chinese revolution was opposed to imperialism and to the domestic warlords and reactionary influences that were in collusion with it …… [T]his Chinese revolution must unite the efforts of all the different groups of revolutionary forces in all China. In the final analysis there must be cooperation between the KMT [Guomindang] and the CCP. Lenin himself had emphatically brought out this point.42
Chen Duxiu was confused by this report. It was necessary to resolve this problem.
Thus, in early May 1922, the First Congress of the Chinese Socialist Youth League, which took place legally in Canton, cautiously expressed the view that it was necessary to support the revolutionary struggle against imperialism and militarism and for the achievement of national independence and civil freedoms.43 This resolution could not have passed without Chen Duxiu's approval. A month later, on June 15, Chen himself published the first “Statement of the Chinese Communist Party on the Current Situation,” in which he acknowledged that Sun Yat-sen's government in Canton enjoyed the support of the workers of South China, and that “of all the political parties that presently exist in China, only the Guomindang is comparatively revolutionary and more or less democratic …… [T]he Chinese Communist Party proposes …… to call upon the Guomindang and other revolutionary democratic groups as well as all organizations of revolutionary socialists to convene a joint conference aimed at creating a united democratic front.”44
Of course, this was written with a heavy heart. It was no accident that in place of the Comintern's definition of a national front, Chen substituted a democratic front, which had a more radical ring to it. Soon, on June 30, he wrote a new letter to Voitinsky saying that the CCP “very much hoped” that the Guomindang would be able to “recognize [the need] to reorganize [i.e., uniting with the communists and political radicalization] and would go forward with us hand-in-hand. However, there is little chance of this happening.”45 This was certainly an original interpretation of the Comintern's policy. Moscow believed not that the Guomindang should march hand in hand with the communists, but that the communists, of whom there were just 195, should form an anti-imperialist alliance with the more powerful party of Sun Yat-sen, with its 10,000 members.
Nevertheless, some positive changes took place, and the CCP's new line was confirmed in the documents of its second congress, held in Shanghai July 16–23, 1922. This meeting took place without Mao's participation. Although he had come to Shanghai, he didn't make it to the congress. In his own words, he “forgot the name of the place where it was to be held, could not find any comrades, and missed it.”46 This is rather strange since Mao at least should have remembered Chen Duxiu's address; he had been there numerous times. But there is no more persuasive explanation of his absence available.47
Mao had no recourse but to return to Changsha, which must have been a matter of regret since the congress was very important. The delegates reorganized the leading organs of the party, selected a Central Executive Committee, headed by Chen Duxiu, in place of the bureau, and founded a new party organ, a journal called Xiangdao zhoukan (Weekly guide). They discussed the main question of forming a united “democratic” front. Of the twelve persons present, five had participated in preparations and proceedings of the Congress of the Peoples of the Far East. Zhang Guotao gave a report to the congress on the Comintern summit, after which the congress registered its agreement with the decisions taken in Moscow and Petrograd, and affirmed the secret resolution about the “democratic united front” and the manifesto.48 Both documents justified the need to establish an interparty bloc of the Communist Party and the Guomindang.49 In class terms, the united front was depicted as a “temporary alliance” of the proletariat and the poor peasantry with the national bourgeoisie, groups that, as the manifesto asserted, were “able to unite their strength to resist foreign imperialism and the corrupt Peking [Beijing] government.”50 The congress ignored Maring's earlier suggestion that communists enter the Guomindang.
Soon after, on August 12, 1922, Maring returned to China. He could not help feeling victorious. He flourished two papers with which to silence those in the CCP who were ill-disposed toward him. The first was an instruction written by the secretary of the Executive Committee of the Comintern, Karl Radek, that wholly supported Maring's initiative regarding the entry of communists into the Guomindang. It emphasized that the Chinese Communist Party should preserve its complete independence within the Guomindang and remain there only until such time as the CCP developed into a mass political organization. The second paper was a directive from Voitinsky, who was now the head of the Far Eastern Bureau of the ECCI. It stated flatly, “The Central Committee of the Communist party of China according to the decision of the Presidium of Comintern of July 18 must …… do all its work in close contact with Comr. PHILIPP.”51 (This was one of Maring's many pseudonyms.)
Right after he returned to Shanghai, according to Zhang Guotao, Maring informed the leadership of the Communist Party that “the Comintern endorsed the idea of having CCP members join the KMT [Guomindang] and considered it a new route to pursue in achieving a united front.”52 On August 25, he visited Sun Yat-sen, who was again in Shanghai, having been chased out of Canton by Chen Jiongming, who had unexpectedly betrayed Sun. Sitting in Sun's cozy office, the ECCI emissary informed the Guomindang leader that Moscow had advised the Chinese communists to unite with his party. He counseled Sun to devote more attention to the mass anti-imperialist movement of the workers and peasants.53 Disoriented from the betrayal by his militarist ally Chen Jiongming, Sun was ready to accept Maring's recommendation and agreed to reorganize the Guomindang. In those days he was pondering the fate of the Chinese revolution and, in his own words, “disappointed in everything he had previously believed.” Right after the coup by his former comrade in arms Chen Jiongming, he became “convinced that Soviet Russia was the only real and true friend of the Chinese revolution.”54
Maring had good reason to celebrate, but Chen Duxiu did not want to capitulate so easily. Neither did the members of the Central Executive Committee of the party chosen at its Second Congress who supported their chairman, including Zhang Guotao; Cai Hesen, who had returned from France in early 1922; Gao Junyu, the editor in chief of the newly created CCP organ Weekly Guide; and Li Dazhao, who was a candidate member of the CEC. Soon, at Maring's request, they convened for a meeting on August 29 in Hangzhou. There the participants rented a boat and for the next two days, with time off for eating and sleeping, they sailed on picturesque West Lake, at the edge of the city, encircled by fantastical hills dotted with elegant medieval pagodas. On this occasion, the tranquil waters covered with bright red lilies did not evoke peace. The boat glided gently between small islands covered in bamboo groves, but the meeting, which was attended by Maring's interpreter Zhang Tailei, along with Maring himself and the members of the CEC, was stormy and dramatic. Judging by Chen Duxiu's recollection, all of the members of the Central Executive Committee present at the meeting opposed the proposal of Maring, who peremptorily demanded the implementation of the ECCI resolution. At first, only Zhang Tailei, who was not a member of the CEC, supported the Kremlin's representative. Maring was furious. All his arguments encountered hostility. Finally, unable to restrain himself and determined to alter the course of the discussion, he threatened to expel the dissidents from the Communist International. He categorically demanded that the assembled submit to Comintern discipline.55
Suddenly, Chen Duxiu understood. There was no point even in dreaming about equality with the Moscow Bolsheviks. His infant party was wholly dependent upon Moscow, which demanded one thing only—absolute obedience. Before the establishment of the CCP, Chen Duxiu had sought most of the funds needed for the functioning of the Bolshevik circles from publishing activities, but with the formation of the CCP there was a catastrophic shortage of funds. The expenditures of the communists were constantly growing, and if, at the beginning of 1921, they amounted to only 200 Chinese dollars, by the end of the year they had reached almost 18,000!56 For a time the leaders of the CCP tried to preserve their innocence, naively believing they could do without subsidies from the Comintern.57 However, this proved impossible. In 1921, the Comintern provided the CCP 16,650 Chinese dollars at a time when the party was able to raise only 1,000 dollars on its own. In 1922 the Chinese communists were unable to scrape together any money at all while they received 15,000 dollars from Moscow by the end of the year.58 They were not in a position to demur. The Kremlin funded not only Chen Duxiu, whose monthly payment was thirty dollars, but also the regional party organizations, so it became a very straightforward choice: either they capitulated to Moscow's authority and continued to receive financial support as before, or they crossed Moscow and got nothing. Rethinking their position, the participants came to the only reasonable conclusion: they unanimously agreed to enter the Guomindang.
They must have felt sick at heart. It is unlikely that the beauty of the lake could have lifted their gloom. At the northwestern shore of the lake towered a stone statue of Yue Fei; the great general of the Southern Song dynasty who had found his final resting place here gazed silently at them. What an irony that this fateful meeting, which turned the CCP into an obedient instrument of foreign politicians, had taken place near the grave of a fearless warrior renowned for his patriotism.
1 See Tony Saich, The Origins of the First United Front in China: The Role of Sneevliet (Alias Maring), vol. 1 (Leiden: Brill, 1991), 309–10.
2 Shanghai diqu jiandang huodong yanjiu ziliao (Materials on Party Building in the Shanghai Region), 10.
3 See Otchet tov. G. Maringa Kominternu. Iul' 1922 g. (Comrade G. Maring's Report to the Comintern, July 1922), RGASPI, collection 514, inventory 1, file 20, sheets 85–91; Zhang Tailei, Zhang Tailei wenji (Works of Zhang Tailei) (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1981), 330; Harold Isaacs, “Documents on the Comintern and the Chinese Revolution,” China Quarterly, no. 45 (1971): 103–4; Lin Hongyuan, “Zhang Tailei,” in Hu Hua, ed., Zhonggongdang shi renwu zhuan (Biographies of Persons in the History of the Chinese Communist Party), vol. 4 (Xi'an: Shaanxi renmin chubanshe, 1982), 81–82; Zhonggong “sanda” ziliao (Materials from the Third Congress of the CCP) (Guangzhou: Guangdong renmin chubanshe, 1985), 12; Saich, The Origins of the First United Front, vol. 1, 216–46, 252, 317–23.
4 Saich, The Origins of the First United Front in China, vol. 1, 323.
5 Jiang Xuanhua, “Dangde minzhu geming gangling de tichu he guogong hezuo celüede jige wenti” (Several Questions Regarding the Party Program for the Democratic Revolution and the Strategy of Cooperation Between the Guomindang and the CCP), Jindaishi yanjiu (Studies in modern history), no. 2 (1985): 116.
6 See “Erda” he “sanda”: Zhongguo gongchandang di' er san ci daibiaodahui ziliao xuanbian (The Second and Third Congresses: Selected Documents from the Second and Third Congresses of the CCP) (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 1985), 36.
7 See Saich, The Origins of the First United Front in China, vol. 1, 284.
8 See Glunin, Komintern i stanovlenie kommunisticheskogo dvizheniia v Kitae (1920–1927) (The Comintern and the Rise of the Communist Movement in China [1920–1927]), 252.
9 Pang, Mao Zedong nianpu, 1893–1949 (Chronological Biography of Mao Zedong, 1893–1949), vol. 1, 85.
10 Ibid., 86.
11 See Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 2, 100.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid., 134.
14 Mao Zedong, Mao Zedong shici duilian jizhu (Collection of Mao Zedong's Poems). (Changsha: Huwan wenyi chubanshe, 1991), 161. Lake Dongting is a big lake north of Changsha. The Xiao and Xiang are rivers in Hunan.
15 Pang, Mao Zedong nianpu, 1893–1949 (Chronological Biography of Mao Zedong, 1893–1949), vol. 1, 91.
16 Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 2, 107.
17 Ibid., 174–75; Snow, Red Star Over China, 155.
18 See Wu, Mao Zedong guanghui licheng dituji (Atlas of Mao Zedong's Glorious Historical Path), 27.
19 Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 2, 174, 175; Zhonggong “sanda” ziliao (Materials from the Third Congress of the CCP), 128.
20 Snow, Red Star Over China, 155.
21 Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 2, 177.
22 Pang, Mao Zedong nianpu, 1893–1949 (Chronological Biography of Mao Zedong, 1893–1949), vol. 1, 92–103; Wu, Mao Zedong guanghui licheng dituji (Atlas of Mao Zedong's Glorious Historical Path), 27–29.
23 Pang, Mao Zedong nianpu, 1893–1949 (Chronological Biography of Mao Zedong, 1893–1949), vol. 1, 119, 128; Ma, Hongse diyi jiazu (The First Red Family), 310–12, 334–35.
24 Mao Zemin, “Avtobiografiia” (Autobiography), RGASPI, collection 495, inventory 225, file 477, sheet 12; Li, Moi otets Mao Tszedun (My Father Mao Zedong), 108; Ma, Hongse diyi jiazu (The First Red Family), 259, 286.
25 Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 2, 136, 137, 177.
26 Pang, Mao Zedong nianpu, 1893–1949 (Chronological Biography of Mao Zedong, 1893–1949), vol. 1, 103–4.
27 Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 2, 132–40.
28 Ibid., 136.
29 Titarenko, VKP(b), Komintern i Kitai: Dokumenty (The CPSU, the Comintern and China: Documents), vol. 1, 236.
30 Snow, Red Star Over China, 152.
31 Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 2, 136.
32 See Wu, Mao Zedong guanghui licheng dituji (Atlas of Mao Zedong's Glorious Historical Path), 26; Pang, Mao Zedong nianpu, 1893–1949 (Chronological Biography of Mao Zedong), vol. 1, 95.
33 Pang, Mao Zedong nianpu, 1893–1949 (Chronological Biography of Mao Zedong, 1893–1949), vol. 1, 95–96.
34 See Wu, Mao Zedong guanghui licheng dituji (Atlas of Mao Zedong's Glorious Historical Path), 26.
35 See Saich, The Origins of the First United Front in China, vol. 1, 344–45.
36 Schram, Mao's Road to Power, vol. 2, 103.
37 Ibid., 93.
38 Pang, Mao Zedong nianpu, 1893–1949 (Chronological Biography of Mao Zedong, 1893–1949), vol. 1, 87; Li, Moi otets Mao Tszedun (My Father Mao Zedong), 119.
39 RGASPI, collection 5, inventory 3, file 31, sheet 56.
40 See V. I. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Complete Collected Works), vol. 44 (Moscow: Politizdat, 1977), 702; Chang, The Rise of the Chinese Communist Party, vol. 1, 207–9.
41 See “Yuandong geguo gongchandang ji minzu geming tuanti diyi ci dahui xuanyan” (Manifesto of the First Congress of Communist Parties and National Liberation Organization of the Countries of the Far East), Xianqu (Pioneer), no. 10 (1922): 4.
42 See Chang, The Rise of the Chinese Communist Party, vol. 1, 220.
43 For more details, see M. I. Sladkovskii, ed., Noveishaia istoriia Kitaia, 1917–1927 (Contemporary History of China, 1917–1927) (Moscow: Nauka, 1983), 108–9.
44 “Zhongguo gongchandang duiyu shiju de zhuzhang” (Statement of the Chinese Communist Party on the Current Situation), Xianqu (Pioneer), no. 9 (1922): 2, 3.
45 Quoted from Glunin, Komintern i stanovlenie kommunisticheskogo dvizheniia v Kitae (The Comintern and the Rise of the Communist Movement in China), 252; Jiang Xuanhua, “Dangde minzhu ganglingde tichu he guogong hezuo celüede jige wenti” (Several Questions Regarding the Party Program for the Democratic Revolution and the Strategy of Cooperation Between the Guomindang and the CCP), 116.
46 Snow, Red Star Over China, 156.
47 Chang and Halliday assert that Mao did not take part because “he was dropped from” the congress (Chang and Halliday, Mao, 31), but they provide no source for this assertion.
48 See Zhongguo gongchandang jiguan fazhan cankao ziliao (Reference Materials on the History of the Development of the CCP Organization), vol. 1 (Beijing: Zhonggong dangxiao chubanshe, 1983), 38.
49 See Zhongguo gongchandang wunian lai zhi zhengzhi zhuzhang (Political Declarations of the Chinese Communist Party over the Past Five Years) (Guangzhou: Guoguan shuju, 1926), 1–23; Zhonggong “sanda” ziliao (Materials from the Third Congress of the CCP), 5–7; Wilbur, The Communist Movement in China, 105–17.
50 Wilbur, The Communist Movement in China, 119–20.
51 Saich, The Origins of the First United Front in China, vol. 1, 327.
52 Chang, The Rise of the Chinese Communist Party, vol. 1, 250.
53 See Dov Bing, “Sneevliet and the Early Years of the CCP,” China Quarterly, no. 48 (1971): 690–91.
54 Cited from S. A. Dalin, Kitaiskie memuary, 1921–1927 (Chinese Memoirs, 1921–1927) (Moscow: Nauka, 1975), 134.
55 See Wang Jianmin, Zhongguo gongchandang shigao (A Draft History of the Chinese Communist Party), vol. 1 (Taibei: Author Press, 1965), 94.
56 See Saich, The Origins of the First United Front in China, vol. 1, 53.
57 Ibid., 310; Chang, The Rise of the Chinese Communist Party, vol. 1, 138.
58 See Yang Kuisong, “Obshchaia kharakteristika otnoshenii mezhdu VKP(b) (KPSS), Kominternom i KPK do 1949 goda” (The General Nature of Relations Between the VKP(b) [CPSU], and the CCP to 1949), Problemy Dal'nego Vostoka (Far Eastern affairs), no. 6 (2004): 103.