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The formative years of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) have long remained one of the most obscure periods in the recent past of China. There remain many puzzles about why and how the alliances, between the CCP and the Kuomintang (KMT) on the one hand and Soviet Russia on the other, came about in the early 1920s.
For the last four years I have been studying the establishment and first years of the CCP, at the same time paying attention to the foundation and first years of the Indische Sociaal Democratische Vereniging (ISDV), which was later to become the Partai Kommunis Indonesia (PKI). In this connexion I have been specially interested in outlining the origins of that strategy whereby Communist Party members entered a nationalist mass movement and tried to capture it from within.
In the areas controlled by the Central Government, the Chinese student movement between 1945 and 1949 was essentially an anti-war movement. As the Civil War progressed during those years, the student protests became one of the Government's major political problems, referred to by Mao himself as the “second front” in the struggle against the Chiang Kai-shek Government. As such, the student anti-war movement assumed its place within the twentieth-century tradition of Chinese student activism.
During the eight years of war with Japan, the strategy and tactics of the Communist movement in China matured to become a viable revolutionary programme. Recent scholarship leaves little doubt that in these years the Communists were successful in winning the allegiance of the majority of the people in areas under their control and in mobilizing them for the further pursuit of revolutionary goals.
The Wuhan Incident of late July 1967 represents the apex of revolutionary violence in 1967 and a turning-point in the Cultural Revolution. Before mid-July, the Maoist group seemed relatively permissive in allowing, and even instigating, clashes throughout the country between various revolutionary factions, each claiming to be more loyal than the other to Mao and the Party Centre. From mid-July to early August, regional military authorities in Wuhan not only sided with the “conservative” revolutionary rebel faction (in violation of a Central Committee directive instructing them to promote unity among revolutionary forces) but also threw down a direct challenge to Peking. This had some of the markings of warlord politics and Peking had no choice but to deal severely with the regional authorities.