China's ruling party finished its founding congress on a tourist boat
In July 1921 a handful of delegates began meeting in a house in Shanghai's French Concession. When French police interrupted them on 30 July, they moved to a pleasure boat on South Lake in Jiaxing to finish. The party they founded then had 57 members; it now claims more than 101 million.
The party grew out of the intellectual ferment of the May Fourth and New Culture movements, when young Chinese progressives debated nationalism, democracy, feminism and the rejection of traditional values without agreeing on solutions. Study circles, which the early communist Cai Hesen called the rudiments of the party, multiplied, but many members doubted they could change anything. Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao, inspired by the Russian October Revolution, founded the party in 1921 with help from Bolshevik and Comintern agents. Neither attended the founding congress, which opened on 23 July with 13 Chinese delegates and elected Chen leader.
Moscow wanted allies in East Asia and backed a partnership with the Kuomintang, the Nationalist party led by Sun Yat-sen, sending Mikhail Borodin to Guangzhou in October 1923. After Sun died in March 1925, his successor Chiang Kai-shek moved against the communists, and in April 1927 he turned on them violently in Shanghai. In July the Nationalist government in Wuhan expelled all communists, and the party formed the Red Army; its uprising at Nanchang on 1 August 1927 lasted only days.
Near-destruction of its city networks reshaped the party. It adopted democratic centralism and created a politburo, concentrating power, and the 1929 Gutian Congress fixed the principle that the party directs the armed forces, still central to its ideology. Over a decade of guerrilla war, Mao Zedong became its dominant figure and won peasant support through land reform, and it proclaimed the People's Republic on 1 October 1949.
Mao led until his death in 1976, overseeing five-year plans, a split with the Soviet Union and the Cultural Revolution. In the 1980s Deng Xiaoping steered the party toward reform and opening up. Officially it adapts Marxism–Leninism to Chinese conditions, calling the result socialism with Chinese characteristics. Its leader holds three posts, general secretary, military commission chairman and state president; Xi Jinping has held them since 2012.
Source: Chinese Communist Party
