Young Revolutionaries in the Metropolis: Shanghai Communism at the Grassroots, 1925–1927

Abstract

This thesis examines early Chinese Communist Party (CCP) members’ actions and organizational operations in Shanghai in the wake of the National Revolution. Mirroring an internal and bottom-up approach to the CCP’s early period in Shanghai, this research incorporates a wide range of unpublished internal CCP sources along with multi-archival documents. Turning away from widely-studied events at the CCP’s upper level, this thesis instead focuses on the Shanghai Communist Party as a crucial local organization at the time, digging down into its lower apparatus to provide a better understanding of the lives of the leaders and rank-and-file in this locality. The research also investigates daily operations and Communist experiences across the organization’s hierarchical levels. Organizational structure, network building, ideological divisions, the enforcement of and reactions to discipline, members’ private lives and mental worlds, and identification with the CCP are all concerned as aspects of the complex experiences of the CCP members. Analysis is provided of the way personal characteristics and individual differences of the local leadership also contributed to divisions at play in specific local revolutionary affairs. Unlike previous scholarship, which has centred on decision-making and policy formulation, this thesis underscores the dynamic processes and effects of the local CCP’s institutionalization and brings to light the under-researched inner logic that drove decision-making. I argue that while the CCP’s scale was expanded at the height of the National Revolution, the Shanghai Communist organization was decentralized and undisciplined to a large extent, and the local leadership was overall vulnerable and weak in handling challenges and hardships of the day-to-day kind. The local leaders were incapable of managing the smooth transplantation of Bolshevik principles and 2 methods. At the same time, these young revolutionaries aiming to institutionalize a standardized Leninist Party encountered setbacks in the form of reactions from the grassroots level of organizations and members, who were an indispensable part of the Bolshevik machinery and essential base of Party activism. In practice, the instability of the Shanghai Communist Party throughout 1925 to 1927 set the scene for the near-destruction suffered by the Chinese Communists during the Guomindang’s purge in April of 1927. These events highlight the limitations of trying to localize the international Communist movement in the 1920s.