Beginng of the Great Revival
: the foundation of the CCP: how it was founded and in what circumstances? What did the Russia play the role in building the CCP.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP, or Zhongguo gongchandang) was founded July 1, 1921, in Shanghai, and started with fifty-seven members. Eighty years later, in 2002, the CCP was the largest national Communist organization in existence, with over sixty-six million members.
The CCP has governed the People’s Republic of China from the republic’s founding in 1949 until today.
Marxism was introduced to China by young intellectuals active in the nationalist movement, which reached its culmination in the demonstrations of May 4, 1919. Th e most immediate cause for the movement was a provision in the Treaty of Versailles that granted Japan sovereignty over part of the Chinese province of Shandong, but it became a means to diffuse the ideas of science and democracy as fundamental motors for the transformation of old China into a modern, powerful nation following the fall of the last imperial dynasty (1911). Th e fi rst Chinese socialists were inspired more by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s and Mikhail Bakunin’s anarchism and the utopian socialism of Charles Fourier than by Marxism. Th is was a consequence of the places that these young Chinese individuals chose to study or live in exile—Japan, but most especially France, where many of the leading cadre of the future Communist Party were educated, including Zhou Enlai (who would become prime minister) and Deng Xiaoping (who would become general secretary). The First Congress in 1921 was the result of preparatory work by Comintern envoys in a Communist movement that was still extremely fragmented and immature.
The party’s structure remained basically stable during its long history. It reproduced itself, moving from the center to the periphery, and was able to penetrate social and economic activities throughout the country. Party cells existed in each...