Chinese Communist Party Founded

In July 1921, a small group of Chinese intellectuals and activists gathered in Shanghai to found the Chinese Communist Party. Fewer than a dozen delegates, representing perhaps fifty or so members nationwide, attended the first congress. Within three decades their organization would defeat its rivals in a civil war and take power over the world's most populous country, making it one of the most consequential political foundings of the twentieth century.

The party emerged from the turmoil that followed the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911. The new Republic of China quickly fragmented, with regional warlords controlling much of the country while foreign powers retained special privileges in treaty ports such as Shanghai. Resentment peaked in 1919, when the Versailles peace settlement transferred former German holdings in Shandong to Japan rather than returning them to China. The resulting May Fourth Movement stirred a generation of students and teachers to seek radical solutions to China's weakness. Many were drawn to Marxism, especially after the Russian Revolution of 1917. Study groups formed in Beijing and Shanghai, led by figures such as Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao, with encouragement and assistance from agents of the Communist International (Comintern).

The first congress met in Shanghai's French Concession, and Mao Zedong was among the delegates, though he was then a minor figure. When police interrupted the proceedings, the participants moved to a boat on a lake at Jiaxing in Zhejiang province to finish their work. The exact opening date of the congress is uncertain in the surviving accounts; the party has long marked 1 July as its anniversary, a convention adopted later. Chen Duxiu was chosen as the leading figure, though he did not attend.

In its early years the party was tiny and weak. Following Comintern advice, it entered an alliance in the 1920s with the Nationalist Party (Kuomintang), but the partnership collapsed in 1927 when Chiang Kai-shek's forces violently purged communists in Shanghai and elsewhere. The survivors retreated to rural areas, and Mao increasingly emphasized organizing the peasantry rather than urban workers. The Long March of 1934–35, a grueling retreat from Nationalist encirclement, became a founding legend and cemented Mao's leadership.

The war against Japan from 1937 and the civil war that followed gave the party the opportunity to expand its base and military strength. On 1 October 1949, Mao proclaimed the People's Republic of China in Beijing, while the Nationalists withdrew to Taiwan. The party founded in Shanghai has governed the mainland ever since, shaping events from the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution to the market reforms begun in the late 1970s.