Acenturyofcommunism:howasuperpowerevolved

• Published date: 05 July 2021
• Publication title: Otago Daily Times (New Zealand)

ANYONE visiting the First Meeting Hall in Shanghai, the museum re-creating the site of the first conclave of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1921, will also find themselves in one of the city’s fanciest districts.

The precise time of the meeting is murky, and July 1 was chosen by Mao Zedong years later for commemoration when he couldn’t remember the exact date on which the dozen or so comrades had held their conclave.

In addition to the Chinese at the meeting in the city’s French Concession, including Mao, there was one representative of the Comintern, or the Communist International. For a period, some attendees were airbrushed out of official accounts, as they were later accused of collaborating with the Imperial Army in the treacherous civil war and Japanese occupation in the 1930s.

In 21st-century China, such apparently glaring incongruities — allowing one of the party’s ‘‘sacred sites’’ to sit amid a yuppie wonderland of upmarket shops and restaurants — barely generates a resigned sigh these days, let alone criticism.

‘‘People can see the progress of the party,’’ Xia Jianming, the Shanghai party school’s director-general, told me when I visited some years back.

‘‘This [setting] is a kind of harmony. In our society, people of different levels may have different ways of meeting their requirements.’’

As origin stories go, the Long March is hard to beat. With Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists gaining the upper hand in their struggle for power, the Communist armies embarked on a series of lengthy retreats into the hinterland.

As the historian Jonathan Spence wrote, for all the mythology and embellishments later added to the tale, the Long March ‘‘was an astonishing saga of danger and survival against terrible odds’’.

The end point was Yan’an in Shaanxi province, in north-central China, the Communist base camp from 1935-47, in readiness for the revolution to come. Mao took over as leader in 1935 and instigated a series of purges that would come to typify his leadership of the CCP until his death in 1976. Being holed up far from the invading Japanese had its advantages.

Although the CCP doesn’t highlight it, the burden of the fighting against Imperial Japan was borne by Chiang and his armies, who also suffered the bulk of the casualties.

After the defeat of the Japanese in 1945, the leadership of China was in play again. The Communist armies’ relative isolation had allowed them to maintain their strength, with the ability not just to conduct guerrilla campaigns but to wage all-out...