by Philip Short
Voitinsky's arrival had been skilfully timed to coincide with the upsurge of enthusiasm for the Soviet Union triggered by Moscow's announcement that it would renounce its extraterritorial rights. He was a man of great tact and charm, and the Chinese with whom he had dealings saw him as the perfect example of everything a revolutionary comrade should be. During the nine months he spent in China, he helped Chen Duxiu organise the ‘communist group’ in Shanghai, the Socialist Youth League and the communist journal, Gongchandang, and drafted the Party Manifesto, which Mao and others received that winter, as a preliminary to holding a founding Congress to bring the provincial groups together to form a full-fledged Communist Party.
Hendricus Sneevliet was a man of a very different stamp. He was a member of the Executive Committee of the Comintern, and had already spent five years in Asia as an adviser to the Communist Party of Dutch-ruled Indonesia. He exuded a mixture of obstinacy and arrogance which signalled not only that he knew better than any of the Chinese comrades, but that it was his bounden duty to bring them into line. Zhang Guotao, a Beijing graduate who had helped Li Dazhao set up the North China ‘communist group’, recalled their first meeting, shortly after the Dutchman's arrival:
This foreign devil was aggressive and hard to deal with; his manner was very different indeed from that of Voitinsky … He left the impression with some people that he had acquired the habits and attitudes of the Dutchmen that lived as colonial masters in the East Indies. He was, he believed, the foremost authority on the East in the Comintern, and this was a great source of pride to him … He saw himself coming as an angel of liberation to the Asian people. But in the eyes of those of us who maintained our self-respect and who were seeking our own liberation, he seemed endowed with the social superiority complex of the white man.8
At the end of June 1921, Mao and He Shuheng left Changsha by steamer, amid great secrecy, to join eleven other delegates, representing Beijing, Canton, Jinan, Shanghai, Tokyo and Wuhan, to attend the founding Congress which Voitinsky had initiated.9 It began on Saturday July 23 – three days later than planned because some of the delegates were delayed – in a classroom at a girls’ school in the French concession which had closed for the summer holidays. Neither Chen Duxiu nor Li Dazhao was present, apparently because the Congress had been called at short notice and they had other commitments. In their absence the proceedings were chaired by Zhang Guotao, whom Mao had met in Beijing two-and-a-half years earlier when he had worked as a library assistant there. Sneevliet and a colleague, Nikolsky, who represented the newly established Far Eastern Secretariat in Irkutsk, led the initial proceedings, but then the meeting recessed for two days to allow a drafting committee to produce texts of a Party programme, Party rules and a statement of Party policy.
When it resumed the following Wednesday, the discussion turned on three points: what kind of party they should create; what stance it should adopt towards bourgeois institutions, specifically the National Parliament and the Beijing and Canton governments; and its relationship with the Comintern.
Sneevliet, in his opening address, noting that all those present were students or teachers, had stressed the importance of forging strong links with the working class. The Marxist scholar, Li Hanjun, who represented the Shanghai group, immediately disagreed. Chinese workers, he retorted, understood nothing of Marxism. It would take a long period of education and propaganda work before they could be organised. In the meantime, Chinese Marxists needed to decide whether their cause would best be served by an organisation propagating Russian Bolshevism or German-style Social Democracy. To rush headlong into building a working-class party, dedicated to proletarian dictatorship, would be a serious mistake. Sneevliet was scandalised. On this issue the Dutchman carried the day, and in its first formal statement, the new Chinese Communist Party (CCP) declared in true Bolshevik fashion:
The programme of our party is as follows: With the revolutionary army of the proletariat, to overthrow the capitalistic classes and to reconstruct the nation from the working class until class distinctions are eliminated … To adopt the dictatorship of the proletariat … To overthrow the private ownership of capital, to confiscate all the means of production, such as machines, land, buildings … and so on, and to entrust them to social ownership … Our party, with the adoption of the soviet form, organises the industrial and agricultural labourers and soldiers, propagates communism, and recognises the social revolution as our chief policy; it absolutely cuts off all relations with the yellow intellectual class and other such groups.10
On the other two points in dispute, the outcome was less satisfactory to Moscow. This was partly because of the way the Congress ended. On July 29, when it became clear that serious disagreements remained, Sneevliet said he wished to put forward some new ideas and asked that the next session take place not at the school but at Li Hanjun's house, which was also in the French Concession. Soon after the meeting began, a man looked through the door, muttered something about having come to the wrong house and hurriedly departed. On Sneevliet's instruction, the delegates immediately dispersed. A group of Chinese detectives, led by a French officer, arrived a few minutes later, but despite a four-hour search, found nothing. After that, it was thought too dangerous to hold further meetings in Shanghai, and the final session was held some days later on a pleasure boat on the reed-fringed South Lake at Jiaxing, a small town on the way to Hangzhou, sixty miles to the south. There, too, Sneevliet was unable to speak: it was felt that the presence of foreigners would make the group too conspicuous, so he and Nikolsky did not take part. As a result, when the boat trip ended at dusk, and the delegates shouted in unison, ‘Long live the [Chinese] Communist Party, long live the Comintern, long live Communism – the Emancipator of Humankind’, they had taken what one of them called ‘many furious and radical decisions’, not all of them to the Comintern's liking.11
They had resolved, for instance, to adopt ‘an attitude of independence, aggression and exclusion’ towards other political parties, and to require Communist Party members to cut all ties with non-communist political organisations.12 This sectarian stance was at odds not only with Sneevliet's hopes for a tactical alliance with Sun Yat-sen's Guomindang, which he rightly saw as the strongest revolutionary force in China at that time, but also with Lenin's thesis, approved by the Second Comintern Congress in Moscow a year earlier, that communist parties in ‘backward countries’, in so far as they were able to exist at all, would have to work closely with national-revolutionary bourgeois democratic movements.13
Had the Congress[Q1] been able to continue until August 5, as originally planned, Sneevliet might have been able to convince them to adopt a programme better suited to China's conditions. As it was, the delegates approved virtually unchanged the drafting committee's proposals – made without Sneevliet's participation – which were modelled on the programme and manifesto of the United States Communist Party, translations of which had been printed in Gongchandang in December, and the statutes of the British Communist Party.14
No less troubling, the delegates failed to reach agreement on the respective merits of the Beijing and Canton governments. In Sneevliet's eyes, as in Chen Duxiu's, the southern regime was much more progressive.
Still worse, from the Dutchman's perspective, the delegates refused to acknowledge Moscow's supremacy. Although the Party programme spoke of ‘uniting with the Comintern’, the Chinese Party saw itself as an equal, not a subordinate.15 The Russians were not happy. Nikolsky's boss in Irkutsk, Yuri Smurgis, spoke dismissively of a Congress of ‘Chinese who fancied themselves communists’.16
In these circumstances, tensions with ‘Mekka’ were bound to continue.
When Chen Duxiu took up his responsibilities as Secretary of the provisional Central Executive Committee in September, he found that Sneevliet, as Comintern representative, was not only issuing orders to Party members on his own authority, but expected him to submit a weekly work report.17
For several weeks, Chen refused to have anyth
ing to do with the Dutchman. The Chinese Party was in its infancy, he told members of the Shanghai group. China's revolution had its own characteristics, and did not need Comintern help. Eventually a modus vivendi was realised, mainly because, Chen's disclaimers notwithstanding, the Comintern provided the money, upwards of 15,000 Chinese dollars a year, which the Party needed to survive.18 But bad blood remained, and not only because of Sneevliet's authoritarian style. He was to be the first in a long line of Soviet advisers to offend Chinese sensibilities, reflecting a cultural and racial divergence which the internationalism of the communist movement initially papered over, but which forty years later would exact its own revenge.
Mao played a minor role in the First Congress. He made a report (which has been lost) on the work of the Hunan group,19 which by July accounted for ten of the fifty-three members of the communist movement in China;20 and he and Zhou Fuhai, a Hunanese student representing the Tokyo group, which boasted all of two members, were appointed official note-takers.21 Zhang Guotao remembered him as a ‘pale-faced youth of rather lively temperament, who in his long gown of native cloth looked rather like a Daoist priest out of some village’. Mao's ‘rough, Hunanese ways’, Zhang wrote, were matched by a fund of general knowledge but only a limited understanding of Marxism.22 None of the participants recall him having contributed much to the debates.23 He evidently felt intimidated by his more sophisticated companions, most of whom, he told his friend Xiao Yu, who was visiting him in Shanghai at the time, ‘are very well-educated, and … can read either Japanese or English’.24 That brought back all his old feelings of inadequacy about languages, and as soon as he returned to Changsha, he plunged into his English lessons again.25 Two months later, the Hunan branch of the CCP was established, with Mao as its Secretary, on the symbolic date of October 10, the anniversary of the Xinhai Revolution launched ten years before.26
For the next few months, Mao devoted himself to building up the Party's tiny following. In November, the provisional Party Centre issued a directive, requiring each provincial branch to have at least thirty members by the summer of 1922.27 Mao's branch was one of three to meet the target, the others being Canton and Shanghai.28 The same month he organised a parade to celebrate the Bolshevik Revolution. This became an annual event, drawing coverage from the Republican daily, Minguo ribao, in Shanghai:
An immense red flag fluttered from the flagpole on the esplanade in front of the Education Association building, with on each side two smaller white banners, bearing the slogan: ‘Proletarians of the World, Arise!’ Other small white flags were inscribed, ‘Long live Russia! Long live China!’ Then came a multitude of small red flags, on which were written: ‘Recognise Soviet Russia!’ … ‘Long live socialism!’ and ‘Bread for the workers!’ Tracts were handed out to the crowd. Just as the speech-making was about to begin, a detachment of police appeared, and the officer in charge announced that, by order of the Governor, the meeting must disperse. The crowd protested, invoking Article 12 of the Constitution, which gave citizens the right of free assembly … But the officer refused to discuss it, and said the Governor's order must be obeyed. The crowd grew angry and shouted: ‘Down with the Governor!’ At that, the police set about their business. All the flags were torn down and the demonstrators forcibly dispersed. It was 3 o'clock in the afternoon, and torrential rain began to fall, preventing any farther resistance.29
Such tensions with Governor Zhao notwithstanding, Mao was able to win enough support from his allies in the provincial elite to establish the ‘Self-study University’ of which he had written a year earlier, financed by an annual local government grant of some 2,000 Chinese dollars, a substantial sum for the time.30
The school's stated objectives were ‘to prepare for reforming society’ and ‘to bring together the intellectual class and the working class’.31 In practice it served as a training ground for future Party activists, numbering at its peak some two dozen full-time students. At first, the fact that it was sponsored by the Wang Fuzhi Society, and was housed in the former Wang Fuzhi Academy, obscured this political purpose, but with time it came closer to Mao's original concept of an academic commune, where teachers and students ‘practised communist living’. Mao gave up his job at the primary school to serve as the university's director, while also teaching Chinese at First Normal.32 He Shuheng was academic dean. He Minfan acted as Principal, until Mao's unconventional ideas about health and fitness caused them to fall out. In the sweltering heat of the Changsha summer, Mao encouraged the students to attend classes in what by the standards of the time was considered a scandalous state of undress. He Minfan, who was of an earlier, more conservative generation, was deeply offended, and after other disagreements they parted on bad terms.33
The main thrust of Mao's activities over the next two years, however, was as a labour organiser. Bolshevik orthodoxy held that the revolution must be built by the proletariat, and the First Congress had laid down that the ‘chief aim’ of the Party was to establish industrial unions.34 There were then about one-and-a-half million industrial workers in China, as against 250 million peasant farmers.35 Conditions in the factories were Dickensian. The noted American labour campaigner, Dr Sherwood Eddy, reported after an investigation in China on behalf of the YMCA:
At the Beijing match factory, there are 1,100 workers, many of them boys between 9 and 15 years old. Work starts at 4 a.m. and stops at 6.30 p.m. with a few minutes rest at midday … seven days a week … The ventilation is inadequate, and the vapour from the low-grade phosphorus damages the lungs. After thirty minutes, my throat was burning. The workers breathe it all day long … On average, 80 fall ill each day. [I also visited] a Beijing textile plant. It employs 15,000 young people. The workers are paid nine [silver] dollars a month for an 18-hour workday, seven days a week. Half are apprentices, who receive no training and are paid no wages, but are simply given food … Their families are too poor to feed them, and are glad to give them to the factory …
In a lodging house I visited, each room, no more than seven feet square, was occupied by 10 workers, half of whom worked by day and half by night. In the whole of that house there was no stove, not a stick of furniture, no fireplace and no lavatory … Nearby, belonging to the same owner, is a sort of windowless cavern with a single door. A group of girls, aged between 10 and 15, sleep there during the day. At night they work in the factory, earning 30 cents a shift. They sleep on a wooden board under a pile of rags. Their biggest worry is that they won't hear the factory siren, and if they arrive late they'll lose their jobs. These people do not live. They exist.36
In Hunan, female and child labour was less common than in the coastal settlements, but otherwise conditions were little different. Until 1920, workers and artisans were organised, as they had been since medieval times, by the traditional trade guilds. But in November of that year two young anarchist students, Huang Ai and Pang Renquan, had established an independent body, the Hunan Workingmen's Association. By the following August, when the Party, at Sneevliet's suggestion, set up a Labour Secretariat under Zhang Guotao, with Mao as head of its Changsha branch, the association had some 2,000 members and had already led a successful strike at the city's Huashi cotton mill.37
Pang was a Xiangtan man, from a village about ten miles from Shaoshan. In September 1921, Mao accompanied him on a visit to the Anyuan coal-mines, part of a big Chinese-owned industrial complex on the border of Hunan and Jiangxi, to see what possibilities might exist for organising the workers there.
He stayed with a distant relative, Mao Ziyun, who worked as a supervisor at the mine. At first his appearance – he wore a traditional blue scholar's gown and carried an oiled-paper umbrella – left the workers perplexed. Despite the May Fourth movement, there was still an almost unbridgeable chasm between mental and manual labour. Gradually, however, the fact that Mao spoke the same dialect and had the same rural origins allowed them to make contact. Exchanging his gown for trousers, he went down into the pits, where he found the miners worked twelve-ho
ur shifts in a temperature of 100 degrees Fahrenheit, naked except for a piece of cloth tied into a turban as protection against head injuries. There was no safety equipment. Gas explosions were common – on average 30 miners died each year – and 90 per cent suffered from hookworm, black lung disease or both.38
This first trip was inconclusive, but in December Mao returned, and shortly afterwards agreed that Li Lisan – who, six years earlier, had sent ‘half a reply’ to his appeal for members for the New People's Study Society – should be based there permanently to establish a school for the workers and their children. Li had studied in France and, on his return, had joined the Party in Shanghai. The non-committal schoolboy Mao remembered had grown into a flamboyant and often impulsive Party militant. Mao advised him to proceed cautiously, first to win the workers’ trust as a teacher, operating, as Li wrote later, ‘under the banner of mass education’, and only later attempting to organize them politically and to set up a Communist Party branch.39
