by Edgar Snow
Leadership in the Chinese Communist Party
From the inception of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) its constitution provided for the election of delegates to periodic congresses, which chose a supreme or Central Committee (CC). The CC itself decided when congresses should convene, but once a decade was a minimum. The GPCR interfered with plans announced to hold a Ninth Congress in 1966.
Congresses of the CCP have taken place as follows:
Founding Congress, Shanghai, June-July, 1921
2nd, Shanghai, July, 1922
3rd, Canton, June, 1923
4th, Shanghai, January, 1925
5th, Hankow, July, 1927
6th, Moscow, July, 1928
7th, Yenan, April, 1945
8th, Peking, September, 1956
The Seventh CCP Congress (1945) elected forty-four full members to the CC and the Eighth Congress (1956) elected ninety-seven full members and ninety-six alternate members. The CC chooses a Political Bureau (Politburo), the equivalent of a Party cabinet. The Eighth Congress CC elected twenty full members of the Politburo (PB) and six alternate members.
From 1921 to 1935 the CCP followed the pattern of Stalin’s Party, in which the General Secretary (of the CC and the PB) held chief responsibility for leadership. The term used in Chinese for “General Secretary” was Tsung shu-chi. General secretaryship of the Party was held by the following:
Ch’en Tu-hsiu
1921-27
Ch’u Ch’iu-pai
1927-28
Hsiang Chung-fa
1928-31
Wang Ming (Ch’en Shao-yu)
1931-32
Po Ku (Ch’in Pang-hsien)
1932-35
Lo Fu (Chang Wen-t’ien)
1935-43
A change in the significance of the title “General Secretary” took place at an enlarged meeting of the PB (including CC members and army commanders) on the Long March at Tsunyi, Kweichow, in January, 1935. At that time Mao Tse-tung won majority control of the PB. The Tsunyi Conference heard and accepted Mao Tse-tung’s critique of Po Ku’s mistakes, and Po Ku resigned as General Secretary. Mao now held the mandate of the Red Army and the Party to lead them on the Long March. Mao was already Chairman (Chu-hsi) of the Central Soviet Government, but the latter had disintegrated. The Tsunyi Conference simply transferred top authority to the Chairman, above the General Secretary. Lo Fu was named new General Secretary, but was subordinated to Mao, who was also named Chairman of the supreme Party revolutionary military committee.
Lo Fu was still General Secretary of the PB when the author visited Pao An in 1936, but Lo Fu referred (in English) to Mao as “leader of the Party.” Mao was Chu-hsi. In a conference of the PB held in Lochuan in 1937, Mao was elected Chu-hsi of the CC and the PB. Lo Fu’s title remained Tsung shu-chi. He was still called that when the author again saw Lo Fu in Yenan in September, 1939. The position of General Secretary was formally abolished at the Seventh National Congress of the Party in 1945. Provision was then made for a Chairman and four Vice-Chairmen of the PB to constitute a standing committee. One of the Vice-Chairmen served as a recording secretary (mi-shu-chang). In 1956 the Eighth National Congress restored the title “General Secretary,” but the position carried less significance than formerly, although it was a job of top administrative coordination. In 1956 Teng Hsiao-p’ing was chosen General Secretary. In the official order of listing, after the Eighth CC’s Eleventh Plenum (August, 1966), Teng still appeared as fifth in rank under Mao Tse-tung—but by 1967 he was under heavy attack, together with Liu Shao-ch’i, from leaders of the GPCR, and it seemed likely that his career had come to an end.
Following is the order of rank of members of the Politburo after the tenth plenary session of the Central Committee of the Eighth Congress of the CCP in 1962, and after the eleventh plenary session in August, 1966, together with notations of official and unofficial action for or against them:
Bibliography
Beyond listing a few works directly related to the principal historical context of this volume, it would seem redundant to offer a general bibliography on China when so many already exist.
Primary sources on the 1921–37 period were virtually nonexistent when this book was written. Much has since been added by the work of foreign scholarship and research as well as by publications released in Peking. An early and basic bibliography of works in Chinese, Japanese, and European languages appeared in Benjamin Schwartz’s Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao. John Rue’s Mao Tse-tung in Opposition contributed some new sources, in 1966, as did Jerome Ch’en’s Mao and the Chinese Revolution (1965), and Stuart Schram’s biography a year later. The Chinese Communist Movement, 1921–27 (Stanford, 1960) and The Chinese Communist Movement, 1937–49 (Stanford, 1962) are bibliographies of materials in various languages prepared by Chun-tu Hsueh. Allan B. Cole compiled another guide to some basic literature in English in his Forty Years of Chinese Communism, published by the American Historical Association (Washington, D.C., 1962).
Bibliographical notes compiled by Howard L. Boorman appear at the end of his essay, “Mao Tse-tung: The Lacquered Image,” China Quarterly (London, Oct.-Dec., 1963). The latter periodical contains many articles of special interest to students of the pre-1949 period of the Chinese revolution, as well as analyses of current information. In Paris the Cahiers Franco-chinois serves a valuable purpose. There are, of course, abundant Russian historical works of which no listing is attempted here.
I. American and European Book on Early Phases of the Chinese Communist Revolution
BERTRAM, JAMES, First Act in China, New York, 1938. An eyewitness account of the Sian Incident.
BRANDT, CONRAD, Stalin’s Failure in China, Cambridge, Mass., 1958.
_____ Benjamin Schwartz, and John K. Fairbank, A Documentary History of Chinese Communism, Cambridge, Mass., 1952.
BUCK, J. LOSSING, Land Utilization in China, Chicago, 1937. Dr. Buck seriously contradicts some of the Communists’ claims regarding the extent of tenancy.
CARLSON, EVANS FORDYCE, Twin Stars of China, New York, 1940. Interesting first-hand impressions of Chinese Communist leaders in 1937–38 by the only American general who applied Communist guerrilla tactics in the training of American troops—“Carlson’s Raiders” of World War II. His China reports were read by President Roosevelt.
CHEN HAN-SENG, Landlord and Peasant in China, New York, 1936. A Harvard graduate who lived in exile before the revolution, Dr. Chen made reports on Chinese agrarian problems which influenced many scholars in China and abroad. He was in 1966 a specialist in Peking’s Institute of International Affairs.
CH’EN, JEROME, Mao and the Chinese Revolution, London, 1965.
CHIANG KAI-SHEK, Soviet Russia in China, New York, 1957. The Generalissimo gives his estimation of the strategic factors that favored his Communist adversaries in China.
CHIANG KAI-SHEK, MME. (SOONG MEI-LING), General Chiang Kai-shek: The Account of the Fortnight in Sian... (original title: Sian: A Coup d’Etat), New York, 1937. A popular version of the Incident, with extracts from the Generalissimo’s diary.
CHOW TSE-TUNG, The May Fourth Movement, Cambridge, Mass., 1960. A Chinese scholar traces the causes and the consequences of the cultural renaissance period, which Mao Tse-tung defines as the beginning of modern revolutionary China.
CLUBB, O. EDMUND, Twentieth Century China, New York, 1964.
COMPTON, BOYD, Mao’s China, Party Reform Documents, 1942-44, Seattle, 1952. Important for several of Mao’s texts which appear only in bowdlerized form in his Selected Works.
DUMONT, RENÉ, La revolution dans les campagnes chinoises, Paris, 1954. Tends to support the Communists’ main contentions concerning problems of land ownership, tenancy, and utilization.
FEI HSIAO-T’UNG, Peasant Life in China, New York, 1939. Generally supports conclusions that a preponderance of poor and landless peasants in China presented a crisis solvable only by land redistribution and social revolutionary changes on a vast scale.
HSIAO
TSO-LIANG, Power Relations Within the Chinese Communist Movement, Seattle, 1962.
ISAAGS, HAROLD R., The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution, Stanford, 1962.
JOHNSON, CHALMERS A., Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power, Stanford, 1965. Valuable for its Japanese sources.
LEVENSON JOSEPH, Liang Ch’i-ch’ao and the Mind of Modern China, Cambridge, Mass., 1959.
LINDSAY, MICHAEL, North China Front, London, 1943.
MAO TSE-TUNG, Une étude de l’éducation physique, trad, par Stuart R. Schram (Mouton), Paris, 1962.
_____ On Protracted War (Yenan, 1938), Peking, 1952.
_____ Red China: Mao Tse-tung Reports on the Progress of the Chinese Soviet Republic, London (Martin Lawrence), 1934.
_____ et ah, Fundamental Laws of the Chinese Soviet Republic, London (Martin Lawrence), 1934.
MCLANE, CHARLES B., Soviet Policy and Chinese Communists: 1931–1946, New York, 1958.
MEISNER, MAURICE, Li Ta-chao and the Origins of Chinese Marxism, Cambridge, Mass., 1967.
MIF, PAVEL, Heroic China, New York, 1937. By a Comintern instructor at Sun Yat-sen (Eastern Toilers’) University in Moscow who taught China’s “Twenty-eight Bolsheviks.” The book is largely a propaganda exhortation.
NORTH, ROBERT C, Moscow and Chinese Communists, Stanford, 1962.
PISCHEL ENRICA COLLOTTI, L’ origine delh rivoluzione cinese, Turin, 1958.
RUE, JOHN E., Mao Tse-tung in Opposition, 1927–35 (Stanford, 1966).
SCHRAM, STUART R., Mao Tse-tung, London, 1966.
_____ The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung, New York, 1963.
SCHWARTZ, BENJAMIN I., Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao, Cambridge, Mass., 1951, reprinted 1966.
SIAO YU (HSIAO YU), Mao Tse-tung and I Were Beggars, Syracuse, N.Y., 1959. By the brother of Hsiao San, but much less credible. Amusing apocrypha.
SMEDLEYH, AGNES, Battle Hymn of China, New York, 1943.
_____ The Great Road: The Life and Times of Chu Teh, New York, 1956.
STALIN, JOSEPH, Selected Writings, New York, 1942.
T’ANG LEANG-LI, The Inner History of the Chinese Revolution, London, 1930.
TAWNEY, R. H., Land and Labour in China, London, 1932, reprinted in New York, 1964. A classical analysis by a noted Western economist of China’s “unsolvable” agrarian problems.
TROTSKY, LEON, Problems of the Chinese Revolution, New York, 1932.
_____ The Third International After Lenin, New York, 1936.
WALES, NYM, Inside Red China, New York, 1939.
_____ (ed.), Red Dust: Autobiographies of Chinese Communists, Stanford, 1952.
WILBUR, C. MARTIN, and JULIE LIEN-YING HOW, Documents on Communism
...,191 8-27, New York, 1956. YANG CHIEN, The Communist Situation in China, Nanking, 1931.
II. Peking Publications on Revolutionary History (Foreign Languages Press)
CH’EN PO-TA, Notes on Mao Tse-tung’s “Report of an Investigation into the Peasant Movement in Hunan” 1954.
_____ Stalin and the Chinese Revolution, 1953.
_____ A Study of Land Rent in Pre-Liberation China, 1958.
Ho KAN-CHIH, A History of the Modern Chinese Revolution, 1959.
HSIAO SAN (EMI SIAO), Mao Tse-tung Tung-chih-ti ch’ing-hsao-nien shih-tai [Comrade Mao’s Boyhood and Youth], 1949. Some sympathetic personal reminiscences. The author knew Mao in his schooldays in Hunan.
Hu CHIAO-MU, Thirty Years of the Chinese Communist Party, 1954.
Hu SHENG, Imperialism and Chinese Politics, 1955.
Li JUI, Mao Tse-tung T’ung-chih-ti ti ch’u-ch’i ke-ming huo-tung [Comrade Mao’s Revolutionary Activities], 1957. Not to be regarded as an official biography. The book was withdrawn from circulation in China.
LIU SHAO-CH’I, How to Be a Good Communist, 1960, should be compared with original, entitled “Training of the Communist Party Member,” published in Yenan in 1939. See Compton, Mao’s China, listed above.
The Long March: Eyewitness Accounts (Symposium), 1963.
LU HSUN, Selected Works, 1957.
The Roar of a Nation, Reminiscences of December 9th Student Movement, 1963.
A complete list of other works published in French and English by the Foreign Languages Press, an official Chinese government organization, may be obtained from Guozi Shudian, P.O. Box 399, Peking, China. Among recent publications are dozens of reprints of polemical documents of the Sino-Soviet schism which throw some light on earlier difficulties in relationships between the Soviet and Chinese parties.
III. Works by Mao Tse-tung Published in China
Prior to 1960 three volumes of Mao Tse-tung’s Selected Works were officially published, in Chinese, covering the period 1926–49. Unofficial English-language translations were issued by the International Publishers, New York and London, in four volumes. The latter covered the following periods: I (1926-37); II (1937-38); III (1939-41); and IV (1941-45). (These four volumes corresponded to Vols. I—III in Chinese.) In 1960, Vol. IV appeared in Chinese. In 1961 the Foreign Languages Press of Peking published, in English, a translation of the Chinese edition of Vol. IV, Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung (1945-49). English translations of Mao’s SW, Vols. I, II, and III, were published by Peking, 1963–65.
In 1963 Peking brought out in English and other foreign translations a 408-page book, The Selected Military Writings of Mao Tse-tung. It contains Mao’s work of that genre from 1928 through 1940. Seventeen pieces of Mao’s poetry were translated in Poems, in 1959, and Mao’s Nine Poems appeared in
English in 1963. In 1966 a collection, Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, was published in Chinese especially for the edification of the Red Guards. Many foreign-language versions became available in the same year. By 1968 China had published 86,400,000 four-volume sets of Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, in addition to 350,000,000 copies of Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, and more than 57,000,000 copies of Chairman Mao’s poems. Those items reached “hundreds of millions of Chinese workers, peasants, and soldiers” as well as “revolutionary people in 148 countries and regions throughout the world,” according to the official Hsin Hua News, January 17,1968.
Since 1949 Mao had produced a steady stream of essays, reports, ideological statements, exhortations, and a few poems, but little had been published under his name. It was known that many of the treatises in the long series of exchanges in the Sino-Russian controversy were written or edited by Mao, as well as much of the abundant accusatory literature of the GPCR, which contains important revelations about early Party history and relations with Moscow. For example, late in 1967 Mao was officially revealed as the author of Khrushchev’s Phony Communism, first printed in the Peking press anonymously in 1964. Three notable pamphlets by Mao published by FLP were: On the Question of Agricultural Cooperation, 1956; Imperialism and All Reactionaries Are Paper Tigers, 1958; and On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People, 1959.
A significant work widely attributed to Mao, but not signed by him, is Historical Experiences of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (in Chinese, 1955–56; English translation, Foreign Languages Press, 1959). Mao told the author that this essay precisely expressed his evaluation of Stalin and the role of a personality cult in the revolution. Other references are listed in the Notes and the Biographical Notes in this volume.
Many of Mao’s speeches, essays, and polemical treatises were revised and edited, before being included in his SW, as Mao himself acknowledged—a practice not unknown to public figures and statesmen from Caesar to Churchill. For the most part the alterations have resulted simply in improved clarity, but when possible, meticulous scholars consult the originals.
Index
ABC of Communism, 271, 335
Abyssinia, 15, 112, 354, 377
Account of the Long March, An, 190n, 204n
Agrarian Reform Law of the People’s Republic of China, The, 420
All-China Peasants’ Union, 161–62
All Men Are Brothers, 67n
Amerasia, 41
5
America, see United States of America
Analysis of Classes in Chinese Society, 160
Anderson Meyer & Co., 251, 253
Andrew, Findlay, 217
Anhui province, 100, 154n, 186, 191, 202, 209, 228, 295, 298, 395, 414
An Jen Ch’ang, 196–97, 199
An Ting, 211, 248, 289
An Tsai, 58–59, 63, 64, 66, 67
Ao Kung Chai, 302
Arabia, 306
Associated Press, 383
Auguste Comte School, 152
Australia, 103
Autumn Harvest Uprising, 165, 166, 168
Awakening Society (Chueh-wu Shih), 73, 148n
Band, William, 415
Bandit Suppression Commission, 43, 379, 392
Battle for Asia, The, 413n
Battle Hymn of China, 416n
Bavaria, 359
Belgium, 103, 346
Bluecher, General Vasili (Galin), 74, 115, 159;
BN 451
Blueshirts, 46, 378–79, 380, 384, 398
Blum, Premier Léon, 346
Borodin, Mikhail Markovich, 74, 98, 163–64, 423–24;
BN 451–52
Bosshard, Reverend, 80