How did the Chinese Communist Party rise to power, drive the Kuomintang to Taiwan, and found the People’s Republic of China?
One may be excused to think that such an old question must have been settled long ago. And indeed, the rise of the Chinese Communist Party is one of the defining and arguably the founding debates of contemporary China studies, as giants such as Karl Wittfogel, John Fairbank, and others fiercely disagreed with each other over 70 years ago. In the post-WW2 years of McCarthyism, this academic contention found itself at the forefront of the political battle over “Who Lost China,” as the American political establishment sought for answers — and scapegoats — in its complete political exclusion from mainland China, despite having aided China throughout its fight against the Japanese.
Yet, 70 years on, Prof. Frank Dikötter of Stanford University reopens this Pandora’s Box with another book: Red Dawn Over China — a play on words based on Edgar Snow’s famous book Red Star Over China, which describes the Yan’an days of the CCP. Prof. Dikötter’s new book tells a story of Soviet secret agents attempting to engineer a communist revolution in China throughout Republican China, and how explaining the rise of the Chinese Communist Party must squarely confront this history of Soviet influence.
For those unfamiliar with Prof. Dikötter, he’s the Milias Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and chair professor of humanities at the University of Hong Kong. He is the most widely read living historian of modern China, with books translated into more than twenty languages. He is the author of The People’s Trilogy, which includes Mao’s Great Famine (2010), The Tragedy of Liberation (2013), and The Cultural Revolution (2016).
I interviewed Prof Dikötter on his latest book, and discussed his new findings and myth-busting of Chinese communist history in the classic Frank Dikötter fashion. This episode — which has been edited for clarity and brevity — is the first of a two-part series, and a joint production with JF Pod.
Enjoy!
Leo
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Reopening the intellectual Pandora’s Box of how the communists won China
It’s amazing that you’ve written yet another book on Chinese history. You write books faster than most people can read. Why one more book on the history of the Chinese Communist Party, and why this period, from the 1920s all the way to 1949?
It’s really a COVID book. As a historian you have to think not just in terms of a topic but in terms of primary sources. If you have good primary sources, the book will write itself.
With COVID, the question was, what can I do? I was in Hong Kong at the time. I spent a good 15 years going across the border into the archives of the People’s Republic of China. And then, of course, the border closed down. So I started dabbling around in sources we have in Hong Kong.
I came across this extraordinary collection, up to 300 volumes of archival material that was collected and published from 1981 to 1988 by the Central Archives in Beijing in collaboration with the provincial archives. It was all material from the Communist Party from roughly 1923-’24 all the way up to roughly ‘47-‘48.
It was an extraordinary amount of material, it was here in Hong Kong, and it corresponded to a desire to go back and revisit those decades from 1921 to ‘49. I worked on the Republican era for the first 15 years or so of my career and then I crossed into the People’s Republic. This was going back into familiar terrain, so to speak.
What about this period attracted you? To me, the question of the origins of the Chinese Communist Revolution was a question that was quite hot in American academia in the ‘40s and the ‘50s, when Fairbank debated with Wittfogel about whether the communist revolution was due to support from the Soviet Union, or whether it was a self-contained, self-indigenous, self-originating revolution that came from an agrarian reformist energy in China. That seems to be an old debate that was long settled. And suddenly you’re reopening Pandora’s box.
I did think. As you said, so much has been debated and apparently settled. Do I still have an interest in the Republican era?
Besides me discovering this huge collection of archival material, I downloaded on my Kindle a book written by John Powell, a journalist who spent decades in China. The title is My 25 Years in China. In that book, John Powell travels everywhere.
There’s one chapter on what he refers to as a war in 1929 between Manchuria — basically the Beijing government — and the Soviet Union. It’s called the 1929 Sino-Soviet War. Now, frankly, I had not really heard of it. I had some vague inkling that something had happened. And we’re talking really about hundreds of thousands of troops. Stalin sends his very best marshal. We’re talking about gunboats, airplanes, towns completely destroyed, a massacre of civilians.
There were huge events that are entirely missing. The 1929 Sino-Soviet war is just one of them.
I Googled this conflict and there was one book written on it: The 1929 Sino-Soviet War by Michael Walker, published in 2017. In the introduction, the author says that very few historians of modern China have actually noticed this particular conflict. I verified that by going through all the mainstream books on modern history written by Europeans, Americans, not least of course some of the people you mentioned, John King Fairbank — very little mention of it at all.
So it occurred to me, rather than all of these debates having been settled for the Republican era, there were huge events that are entirely missing. The 1929 Sino-Soviet war is just one of them.
The raid on the Soviet embassy carried out in April 1927, during which vast amounts of Soviet material was discovered, is known but hardly mentioned. The March 1927 Nanjing incident in which troops led by communist commissars during the Northern Expedition massacred several high-flying Europeans and forced Europeans to intervene in Nanjing — barely mentioned at all.
I thought this period really should be read not from the point of view of secondary sources but really from primary sources. The secondary sources create an ivory tower. And you have to remember — with all due respect — the historians who worked in the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s were working in circumstances which were not exactly ideal. One could not just travel to the People’s Republic of China to consult archives. There was very little material available.
A lot of it revolved not so much around the examination of evidence but rather a particular ideological point of view. And it occurred to me that a lot of that ideological point of view, not least to one proposed by Fairbank and his followers, was rather sympathetic to the communists. Although what any reader of primary sources will discover when reading something about the communists in the 1920s, ‘30s, and ‘40s is that they were quite brutal and violent toward other people and each other.
Busting the myth of popular communist appeal in China
Let’s talk about some of the myth-busting new finds that you discovered.
Well, the most important find is not exactly rocket science. The evidence was there in plain sight. What really took me aback is something we all know but we don’t really sufficiently take into account.
When the Chinese Communist Party was established in Shanghai, in 1921, there were about a dozen people in that room, including several Soviets. It was set up entirely under the guises of the Comintern, the Communist International. It was a Comintern envoy from the Netherlands, Henk Sneevliet, who arranged that meeting, and he found it very difficult because the 57 members of the Chinese Communist Party that were represented by these delegates squabbled and hardly agreed on anything.
At no point all the way until 1940 do the communists represent anything but a mere fraction of the population.
Within a few years this Communist Party attracted no more than a few hundred people, until the Soviets, including Lenin, realized that communism had very little appeal. They must create a united front, which was realized in 1923-’24, when the Soviet Union started subsidizing the Nationalist Party under Chiang Kai-shek on the condition that Communist Party members were allowed inside the ranks.
The key point is that at no point all the way until 1940 do the communists represent anything but a mere fraction of the population.
I can give you a few numbers. The most important one is probably 1936. You might say, well, that’s unfair because that’s the end of the Long March, which is basically a long defeat. But at that point, the Communist Party had about 40,000 followers in a country that is the size of Europe and counted about half a billion people. One out of 8,000 people in China was a follower of communism. It’s not exactly impressive.
For roughly the same years, 1934 to 1936, if you look at Finland, where the Communist Party was banned, one in 700 people was an underground follower of communism. If you look at a fascist country, Portugal, the number in 1934 was one in 280 people.
We’d be hard pressed to find a country in which communism had less of a popular appeal.
In any European country, with the exception possibly of Nazi Germany, the appeal of communism was much bigger than it was in the Republic of China. In fact, we’d be hard pressed to find a country in which communism had less of a popular appeal.
If you fast forward to 1940, according to the numbers of the Communist International itself — which were of course inflated — about one in 1,700 people in China was a communist. And in 1940 we’re talking about the United Front, so you could join the Communist Party if you wished to do so. That’s pretty much the same as the number of followers of the Communist Party of the United States of America.
So, to me, if you want to talk about the social conditions for the revolution, if you want to talk about land reform among the so-called peasants of China in the 1930s or the appeal of the communists, and you do not take into account these numbers, really you are just wasting time. They had the same appeal as a religious sect in a province like Henan.
I think this illustrates quite well that historians, when writing stories about the past, are often writing stories about their ideologies and their images of the past, the present, and the future, especially when evidence is lacking.
But also we have this story of how this obscure tiny group of intellectuals and students, with some amount of foreign funding and organization, grew to become the dominant power in the biggest country in the world, ruling over a huge landmass. And so the puzzle is, how did they do that?
I find it quite interesting that you start your book not at the end of Qing, not at the October Revolution in Russia, but at the French Revolution. Could you talk about why you begin the story about the origins of the Chinese Communist Party in France?
The reason is that there is a modern way of looking at politics, and the intellectual foundations are with the French thinkers behind the French Revolution. The power resides in the people. Not in a king, not in an emperor. It’s not granted by heaven, not given by a god, but resides in the people.
Then you had a long debate about, who are the people? Should women, marginalized groups, and enslaved people be included? Emancipation became a key term throughout the 19th century. But there was something else: Should that new political order be achieved through reform or through revolution?
We read in textbooks that the moment the Bolshevik revolution appears, people in China are absolutely enraptured by what is happening. That is simply not true.
The key turning point for the 20th century was Lenin, when he seized power from above in the 1917 revolution. He wasn’t going to wait for the emancipation of workers from below through reform and a legal process. He wanted to have a revolutionary party that dictated the revolution from above.
So he seized his power, had a monopoly over it, and then guided it all the way through. He was a great inspiration to a number of people, including Mussolini. He saw how Lenin did it and himself had a march on Rome where he imposed his power on a very reluctant parliament.
Mussolini in turn inspired the Nazis to seize power, the Machtergreifung in German. It’s an interesting term, because in Chinese, it’s duoquan, which is a term so fundamental to Chinese communism. The idea that you must seize power from the class enemies and direct a revolution from above — that is the source of inspiration for the communists. But also, it would be fair to say, for the nationalists in Guangzhou who were themselves a revolutionary party by 1921, ‘22, ‘23 under Sun Yat-sen.
The point is that the Bolshevik revolution might offer a vision of a party seizing power from above, but the whole Marxist background has very little appeal. We read in textbooks that the moment the Bolshevik revolution appears, people in China are absolutely enraptured by what is happening. That is simply not true.
The evidence is that you have to wait until 1919 for a very small number of intellectuals, like Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu, to be specifically approached by agents of the Comintern, established in 1919, for them to start thinking about Bolshevism and Marxism as an alternative. It’s a very small number of individuals who have been cultivated by agents from Moscow who actually led the establishment of the Communist Party in 1921.
Imperialist yoke in China, Russia vs. Japan
I find it fascinating the way you described these Russian individuals in Republican China in the late 1910s and the early 1920s. Could you talk a bit about this underground — or maybe not so underground — world of Russians in China?
What I have endeavoured to do in the book is not just focus on a very small number of Communist Party members. I also try to rethink the Republican era. I’m not keen to portray the 1920s and ‘30s as an era of great imperialism.
Subsequent governments, whether it is the Beijing government or then the Nanjing government, worked very hard at abolishing the so-called unequal treaties with extraterritoriality. Hankou was returned by the Brits in early 1927. The restitution of tariff autonomy takes place at the very end of the 1920s. I talk about a number of agreements signed by most imperial powers, not the Soviet Union, to relinquish all concessions within a period of five to ten years.
I also talk about very broad social trends. After 1917 there was a massive influx of Russians into Manchuria and Shanghai. Among them were agents sent by the Comintern, who were supported by what would become the Soviet embassy once the Soviet Union was recognized. And there was this fight between the so-called white Russians who were anti-Soviet, and the ones sent by the Soviet Union.
The Soviet Union and Japan viewed each other with great suspicion and were constantly afraid that Manchuria would be seized by the other.
This is also a reason why Manchuria was such a complicated region, because the regional governor, Zhang Zuolin was anti-Soviet Union. He realized that Manchuria was seen as a buffer zone by both Russia-slash-Soviet Union and Japan. These two powers would determine the fate of the Republic of China throughout the 1920s, ‘30s, and ‘40s. They were the ones that started wars — the 1929 Sino-Soviet War, and the Japanese attacking in 1931 and 1937. But until the Sino-Soviet war 1929, the white Russians were very helpful to Zhang Zuolin in trying to restrain the Soviet influence.
Why did China matter so much to the Soviets at all, especially from so early on, when the Soviet Union itself was hardly as stable and prosperous as it needed to be?
It didn’t start with the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union continued the approach of the Russian Empire. There was a background not just of competition and rivalry, but actually armed confrontation between the Tsarist Empire and the Japanese Empire. There was a war over Manchuria in 1904-’05, which the Japanese won.
And this continued after the collapse of the Qing. Both of them viewed each other with great suspicion and were constantly afraid that Manchuria would be seized by the other. They tried to take preemptive action to prevent this from happening in the 1920s and ‘30s, and this led to a full-fledged war in 1937.
When the Soviets came to China, agents tried to cultivate different kinds of Chinese individuals. They first used Marxism to appeal to idealistic students and intellectuals.
Later they decided, actually intellectuals and students are no use. What mattered is that you need a united front to cultivate power inside the Kuomintang, be part of that political machine and try to subvert it from the inside. And so you had folks like Zhou Enlai who were placed in high offices within the KMT.
Eventually the Soviets and Chiang Kai-shek fell out and the Soviets decided they needed their own troops for a military takeover of China. Is that an accurate description of the series of Soviet strategies towards China?
Yes. First of all, the Comintern, the Communist International, was established with the specific purpose to overthrow all capitalist governments. The communists wanted a world revolution. This was a pretty enormous task. In 1919 just one country was communist, the Soviet Union.
They tried in 1923 to engineer a German revolution, which failed miserably. Left-leaning parties in Germany were actually in favor of legal reform, reform at the ballot box, as opposed to revolution.
The Soviets armed any faction they thought they could control to influence politics in the Republic of China.
Then they turned their gaze toward China, which became their next big hope. What the Soviets were trying to do was more or less arm any faction that they thought they could control to influence politics in the Republic of China.
The Japanese did something very different. They just tried to get a hold of Manchuria, first in 1931 and then with a full-fledged war in 1937. Both were concerned about the relationship between the Republic of China and their enemy. The Japanese were afraid of an alliance between Nanjing and Moscow. Moscow was afraid of an alliance between Beijing or Nanjing and Tokyo.
Within this realm of imperialist competition, it seems to me there are broadly two camps. You have the Americans, the British, the French, who broadly wanted a unified China that they could trade with, that had a market, that had regular governance and a functioning state.
And then you had the Russians and the Japanese who favored the breakup of China so they could carve their own spheres of influence. Why did different imperialist powers have different visions?
The biggest contrast is really between the Brits and then to a lesser extent some of the other European powers versus, as you pointed out very correctly, Russia-slash-Soviet Union and Japan.
When we read about the imperialist powers carving up China at the end of the 19th century, that is an exaggeration. When we talk about the scramble for China in the 1890s, what comes to mind is the scramble for Africa. But what happened in Africa under Leopold II in Congo, for instance, bears no resemblance to what happened under the Qing during the 1890s.
What did happen was that many imperial powers wanted a port and they were afraid that the Qing couldn’t guarantee the safety of their own subjects in the ports that they were leasing. So imperialist powers — Germany, Italy to a lesser extent, Britain, France — all obtained ports and the right to have people living under extraterritoriality. They were afraid that they were being attacked, so they also started placing gunboats there to protect their own nationals.
This was imperialism, but it was hardly the massacre of huge swathes of the population in Africa, or reducing entire parts of Africa to slave labor and extracting resources. What the Germans and French wanted was what the English had. Hong Kong is the model they aspired to. They wanted a German Hong Kong, a French Hong Kong.
But the Russians and the Japanese wanted a buffer zone. They were afraid of the other seizing the territory in between, Manchuria.
When Zhang Zuolin raided the Soviet embassy in Peking
But clearly the Soviets were not happy with just Manchuria. They were looking at the whole of China — Canton, Beijing, Shanghai, Wuhan. So I think China was clearly bigger than a buffer zone story.
Yes, there’s two things. One is that they were not looking at Beijing and Nanjing; they were looking at Berlin, Paris, London. There was a raid on the Soviet embassy carried out by Zhang Zuolin in Beijing in April 1927, and then they seized mountains of documents.
Remarkable story.
A remarkable story which really should get at least a paragraph or two in any standard history of that period. Li Dazhao getting garroted to death is the only thing ever mentioned. Important as that may have been, what mattered is that Zhang Zuolin now had proof that Moscow had been funding the military overthrow of the internationally recognized government of Beijing all along.
The Soviets had this mission of worldwide revolution. The raid on the Soviet embassy in Beijing and the documents that came out of it were important internationally. The Brits thought that the Soviets might have been doing the same thing in the United Kingdom. There were widespread strikes in Britain around about 1926. So they in turn organized their own raid.
This is called the Arcos Affair, after the All Russian Co-operative Society — basically a sort of pseudo-embassy in London where the Soviets did their business. It was raided and it led to the rupture of diplomatic relationships between London and Moscow for about a year or two. In other words, this was a massive international event.
Their hope was that if you could have a communist revolution in China, that could damage the trading interests of Britain to such a point that people would take to the streets of London.
This raid on the Beijing embassy is hardly ever mentioned, although it gave rise to a raid in London, which is mentioned in every textbook. From the point of view of historiography, this is very interesting, but the key point is that the Russians were trying to do this everywhere.
The Japanese were concerned with the buffer zone. So was Moscow, but on top of that, they wanted to ignite a worldwide revolution and their hope was that if you could have a communist revolution in China, that could damage the trading interests of Britain in particular to such a point that people would take to the streets of London, and there would be a communist revolution there as well. They hoped to create a chain of events that would lead to a worldwide revolution. That’s what the Soviets were trying to do. So yes, you’re absolutely right, there was more than just a buffer zone there.
That takes us to the 1929 Sino-Soviet war, which I’ve never heard about and which I now realize is actually quite an important turning point. Could you talk about that? Why does it matter? And also, why do you think it’s somewhat buried?
The 2017 book by Michael Walker I mentioned earlier, The 1929 Sino-Soviet War, is subtitled The War Nobody Knew. He confirms in the introduction that people don’t mention it.
Although John Powell — and a great number of other journalists — was describing this war to the world abroad. At the time it had a huge impact. The question was: if the Soviet Union is willing to go and fight the Republic of China in Manchuria and send well over 100,000 soldiers, which country will be next? Because the idea was that they were busy with their own revolution. But no, they not only reconquered all of Siberia, but they also were at least willing to go to war with a neighboring country.
Why did they do it? Because in 1929, after the raid of the the Soviet embassy in Beijing in ‘27, Zhang Zuolin’s son, Zhang Xueliang, realized that the Soviets were using the railway to which they have a concession — the China Eastern Railway, CER, the one that runs through Manchuria — to propagate communism and distribute pamphlets. He more or less arrested a great bunch of them and sent them back into the Soviet Union. That was the start of this war.
Zhang Xueliang was a keen opponent of communism. Stalin reacted and he was brutal. He sent a great many troops, crushed Zhang Xueliang, and imposed his own conditions. The interesting thing is that Stalin also thought that by opening granaries in Manchuria he could provoke a spontaneous revolution. In order to create a spontaneous communist revolution he wanted to create a pincer movement, with the Soviet troops in Manchuria who tried to provoke some sort of revolution, but there was also now a desire to give much greater support to the communists in the south. He specifically named Mao Zedong as a key leader.
Stalin’s ideas were always keenly reflected by Mao Zedong, in particular his saying that a single spark can set the prairie alight, which appears on the 5th of January 1930, merely months after the end of the 1929 Sino-Soviet war. If you just create that spark, the masses will join the revolution. This is Stalin’s idea, reflected by Mao. The result is that Mao got recognition from Stalin, and of course more funding.
Recommended reads
Frank Dikötter, 2026, Red Dawn Over China, Bloomsbury Publishing
Frank Dikötter, 2010, Mao’s Great Famine, Bloomsbury Publishing
Frank Dikötter, 2013, The Tragedy of Liberation, Bloomsbury Publishing
Frank Dikötter, 2016, The Cultural Revolution, Bloomsbury Publishing
Michael Walker, 2017, The 1929 Sino-Soviet War, University Press of Kansas
About us
The Peking Hotel podcast and newsletter are digital publications in which Liu He interviews China specialists about their first-hand experiences and observations from decades past. The project grew out of Liu’s research at Hoover Institution collecting oral history of China experts living in the U.S. Their stories are a reminder of what China used to be and what it is capable of becoming.
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