Founding of the Chinese Communist Party

Intellectual Origins and Comintern Support

The founding of the CPC was shaped by two converging forces: the domestic intellectual ferment of the May Fourth Movement (1919) and the organisational resources of the Communist International (Comintern) in Moscow. The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 had provided a compelling model — a semi-peripheral country breaking free from imperialism through vanguard-party organisation — and the newly established Soviet state had an obvious interest in supporting revolutionary movements along its borders.

Henk Sneevliet (known as Maring), a Dutch Comintern agent, arrived in China in June 1921 and played a key role in convening the First Congress. He was not alone: Gregory Voitinsky had arrived in China in 1920 and helped organise Communist study groups in Shanghai and Beijing. The most significant domestic figures were Chen Duxiu — editor of La Jeunesse and arguably China's most prominent radical intellectual — and Li Dazhao, the Peking University librarian who had written China's first major analyses of Marxism. Both were absent from the Congress but directed it from afar.

The First National Congress

The Congress opened on 23 July 1921 in a building in the French Concession at 106 Wangzhi Road (now preserved as a museum). The thirteen delegates represented Communist cells in Shanghai, Beijing, Wuhan, Changsha, Jinan, Guangzhou, and Japan. Among them was Mao Zedong, twenty-seven years old, representing the Hunan cell. Virtually all thirteen delegates were urban intellectuals — students, teachers, editors, and journalists — with no industrial workers among them, a notable gap between the party's proclaimed identity as a proletarian vanguard and the social reality of its founding membership. When a French concession police officer appeared at the meeting on 30 July, the delegates fled by boat to Nanhu Lake (South Lake) in Jiaxing, Zhejiang Province, where the Congress concluded aboard a rented pleasure boat.

The Congress adopted a constitution and programme calling for the overthrow of the capitalist class, seizure of political power by the proletariat, and alliance with the Soviet Union. Chen Duxiu was elected the party's first General Secretary despite his absence — he had been directing the communist movement in Guangzhou since early 1921 and was under close surveillance by local authorities, making travel to Shanghai too dangerous. The party at this point was minuscule — fifty-seven members, compared to the Kuomintang's hundreds of thousands — and the path from Shanghai 1921 to Beijing 1949 was far from obvious.

Early Strategy and the First United Front

The infant CPC initially operated under close Comintern direction, which pushed it toward a United Front with the Kuomintang (KMT). The First United Front (1923–1927) required CPC members to join the KMT as individuals while maintaining their separate party organisation. This policy — imposed against the instincts of many CPC members — reflected Moscow's assessment that China was not ready for socialist revolution and required a bourgeois-democratic stage first.

The United Front period allowed the CPC to expand rapidly, riding the tide of nationalist sentiment generated by the KMT's Northern Expedition. Party membership grew from under 1,000 in 1923 to nearly 58,000 by early 1927. The partnership ended catastrophically with the Shanghai Massacre of April 1927, which drove the CPC underground and killed thousands of its members — setting the stage for nearly a decade of guerrilla warfare and eventually the Long March.

The Contested Legacy of July 1

The CPC officially designates 1 July as Party Founding Day, though historians have established that the Congress actually opened on 23 July. The discrepancy reflects the difficulties of historical reconstruction — key records were lost or destroyed — and the political need for a symbolically resonant date. The Nanhu meeting location in Jiaxing has become a major heritage site, though some scholars note that the exact boat used cannot be identified with certainty. The Congress building in Shanghai has been reconstructed and serves as one of the most politically charged museums in China.