The Barrel of a Gun: Shanghai 1927, the Communist Party, and Mao's Turn to the Peasants

Part I: The Party Moscow Built (Review Question 1)

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, pp. 439–441. Reading-guide sentence (p. 440): "This entailed teaching 'democratic centralism,' the secret to party discipline."

Why open in April 1927

Chapter 24's last lecture ended with the National Revolutionary Army in Shanghai in March 1927, so the deck opens on the morning of 12 April (slide b) and then goes back to 1919. The cold open does two jobs. It gives first-year students the stakes before the organizational history, which can feel abstract, and it frames Review Question 1 as a puzzle: how did allies who had just taken China's largest city come to kill one another within three weeks?

From study groups to a Leninist party

Ebrey's account of the party's origins (pp. 439–440) is compact and reliable. Li Dazhao's essay on Marxism appeared in the issue of New Youth dated May 1919 (published some months late); Maurice Meisner's biography remains the best guide to how Li bent Marxism toward a national, even populist, theory in which China as a whole was a "proletarian nation."¹ The Comintern's first agent, Grigori Voitinsky, reached Beijing and Shanghai in the spring of 1920 (slide f). The founding congress opened in the French Concession on 23 July 1921 with thirteen Chinese delegates representing about fifty members, and two Comintern representatives, Henk Sneevliet (Maring) and Vladimir Nikolsky; after a police intrusion it finished on a boat on South Lake at Jiaxing (slide g).² Van de Ven's argument is worth knowing: the early party was less a Moscow creation than a loose network of intellectuals that only gradually became the disciplined organization democratic centralism described. That is a useful corrective to the deck's strong framing, and good material if a student asks whether the Comintern was all-powerful.

The work-study students in France (slide e) are a good human hook. Marilyn Levine counts some 1,600 who went in 1919–1920, among them Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping, Cai Hesen and Xiang Jingyu; the European branch they formed fed the party's leadership for decades.³

The alliance ordered from Moscow

Ebrey dates the decision to ally with the Nationalists to 1922 (p. 440), which matches the West Lake plenum of August 1922, where Maring invoked Comintern authority against the objections of Chen Duxiu and others (slide h). The Third Congress ratified entry in June 1923 and the Nationalist First Congress formalized it in January 1924, as Chapter 24 Lecture 4 already teaches. The deck therefore keeps Ebrey's 1922 for the decision and does not re-teach the formal start.

The peasant associations

Slide i introduces Peng Pai, who is not in Ebrey, because students need a face for "farmers' associations" and because Peng's Haifeng movement (from 1922) was the model on which the Nationalist Peasant Movement Training Institute, later directed by Mao, was built.⁴ Ebrey's figure of more than one million members by the end of 1926 is consistent with the Nationalist Peasant Department's own reports; Hunan's associations alone claimed about two million by early 1927, though such claims were inflated.

Shanghai, March and April 1927

Ebrey's "more than six hundred thousand" strikers on 21 March (p. 440) is within the range of the sources; Communist accounts give about 800,000, and the deck says "hundreds of thousands" in the headline and gives Ebrey's number in the bullets. The pickets took the Chinese districts in about thirty hours of fighting; Zhou Enlai was among the organizers (slide j). Elizabeth Perry's work on Shanghai labor shows how the city's unions were built on native-place and gang networks, which is why the Green Gang could penetrate them so easily.⁵

For slide k, Brian Martin's study of the Green Gang is the standard account: Du Yuesheng's role, the "Common Progress Association" created as a fake workers' body, the funding from Shanghai bankers and Chiang's agents, and the murder of Wang Shouhua on the night of 11 April.⁶ Accounts differ on whether Wang was buried alive; the deck says only that he was killed and buried outside the city. Harold Isaacs's Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution (1938) is a classic but a Trotskyist polemic; use it for color, not for numbers.

The death toll

Ebrey gives "an estimated five thousand were killed" (p. 440). There is no reliable total. Contemporary and later Chinese local histories give about 300 killed and many more missing in the first three days, and thousands killed, executed or vanished in the weeks of the purge that followed in Shanghai alone. The deck therefore says "hundreds in the first days and thousands in the weeks after" (slide b). If students ask, the honest answer is that the figure is unknown and that Ebrey's number is a plausible order of magnitude for the whole purge in Shanghai.

Wuhan and the end

Two details on slide l come from outside Ebrey. Zhang Zuolin's police raided the Soviet embassy compound in Beijing on 6 April 1927 and hanged Li Dazhao with nineteen others on 28 April (Meisner). The Wuhan break came in July after M. N. Roy showed Wang Jingwei Stalin's telegram of June 1927 instructing the Communists to raise their own peasant army; Wang's government expelled the Communists on 15 July, and Borodin left at the end of the month.

Part II: The Barrel of a Gun (Review Question 2)

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, pp. 441–442. Reading-guide sentence (p. 441): "Mao was born in 1893 in a farming village about 30 miles south of Changsha (chahng-shah), the capital of Hunan province."

Mao before Marxism

Ebrey's biographical sketch (p. 441) is sound, with three small exceptions listed below. Its emphasis, that Mao "was just one of hundreds of Communist Party organizers" through the 1920s, is the right corrective to the cult; the deck keeps it on slide o. Stuart Schram's multi-volume edition of Mao's pre-1949 writings is the essential source for this period, and Philip Short's biography is the most readable.⁷ Slide o also carries the pointer to the course's Mao Stream & Discuss assignment (due 10 December), at Steven's request.

The Hunan Report and the gun

The "Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan" (February 1927) is the hinge of Review Question 2 (slide r). Its most quoted lines, "A revolution is not a dinner party" and the prediction that the peasants would rise "like a mighty storm," are in Schram vol. 2. The phrase on slide s comes, in Schram's edition, from Mao's remarks at the emergency party conference at Hankou on 7 August 1927, where he said political power is obtained from the barrel of a gun; Ebrey describes it as a "report," which is close enough that the deck simply gives the date and the meeting. The same conference removed Chen Duxiu (slide cc).

Jinggangshan and Jiangxi

Stephen Averill's Revolution in the Highlands shows how the base areas were built on local networks of teachers and lineage elites, not just on peasant anger, a useful nuance for strong students.⁸ The Chinese Soviet Republic was proclaimed at Ruijin on 7 November 1931 with Mao as chairman of its government (slide u). The Xunwu survey (slide w) was conducted in May 1930 and is available in Roger Thompson's annotated translation, whose introduction is the best short guide to Mao's method of "social investigation."⁹

Changsha, 1930

Ebrey dates the assault on Changsha to October 1930 (p. 442). Peng Dehuai's Third Army Corps held the city from 27 July to early August 1930; a second assault by the combined First Front Army, which Mao and Zhu De led under orders, failed in September. Yang Kaihui was arrested on 24 October and executed on 14 November 1930 (slide x). These dates come from Schram and Short and from Changsha party-history sources.

Pierian Spring: Guangzhou and Chen Duxiu

The Guangzhou rising of 11–13 December 1927 (slide bb) was pressed by Comintern agents, partly because Stalin needed a success against Trotsky's criticism; C. Martin Wilbur's The Nationalist Revolution in China gives a balanced short account. Ebrey's "three thousand to four thousand" executed is within the range of the sources; some give over five thousand dead in all. The deck avoids the surviving photographs of corpses and uses the modern memorial instead. Chen Duxiu (slide cc) was removed as leader on 7 August 1927, expelled in November 1929 after aligning with Trotsky's critique, arrested by the Nationalists in October 1932 and sentenced in 1933; he was released in 1937 and died in Sichuan in 1942.¹⁰

Corrections and Cautions

Notes

1. Maurice Meisner, Li Ta-chao and the Origins of Chinese Marxism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967). Li developed the idea of China as a "proletarian nation" in 1920. ↩

2. Tony Saich, The Origins of the First United Front in China: The Role of Sneevliet (Alias Maring), 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1991); Hans J. van de Ven, From Friend to Comrade: The Founding of the Chinese Communist Party, 1920–1927 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). ↩

3. Marilyn A. Levine, The Found Generation: Chinese Communists in Europe during the Twenties (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993). ↩

4. Fernando Galbiati, P'eng P'ai and the Hai-Lu-Feng Soviet (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985). ↩

5. Elizabeth J. Perry, Shanghai on Strike: The Politics of Chinese Labor (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993). ↩

6. Brian G. Martin, The Shanghai Green Gang: Politics and Organized Crime, 1919–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). ↩

7. Stuart R. Schram, ed., Mao's Road to Power: Revolutionary Writings 1912–1949, vols. 1–3 (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1992–1995); Philip Short, Mao: A Life (New York: Henry Holt, 1999). ↩

8. Stephen C. Averill, Revolution in the Highlands: China's Jinggangshan Base Area (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006). ↩

9. Mao Zedong, Report from Xunwu, trans. and ed. Roger R. Thompson (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990). ↩

10. Lee Feigon, Chen Duxiu: Founder of the Chinese Communist Party (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). ↩

Suggested Reading for Deeper Preparation

Hans J. van de Ven, From Friend to Comrade (1991). How a network of intellectuals became a Leninist party, 1920–1927.

Tony Saich, The Origins of the First United Front in China (1991). Maring's papers and the Comintern's role, with documents.

Elizabeth J. Perry, Shanghai on Strike (1993). Why Shanghai's workers organized as they did, and why the unions broke.

Brian G. Martin, The Shanghai Green Gang (1996). Du Yuesheng, the April purge, and the gang's alliance with the Nationalists.

Stuart R. Schram, ed., Mao's Road to Power, vols. 1–3 (1992–1995). Mao's own writings, 1912–1930, with expert introductions.

Philip Short, Mao: A Life (1999). The most readable full biography, careful on the early years.

Mao Zedong, Report from Xunwu, trans. Roger R. Thompson (1990). The survey itself, with an introduction on Mao's method.

Stephen C. Averill, Revolution in the Highlands (2006). How the base areas were built on local networks.