The Formation of the Chinese Communist Party by Yoshihiro Ishikawa (review)

The Chinese Communist Party, ruling the world’s most populous nation for over sixty years, is soon approaching the centenary anniversary of its founding, while showing no signs of losing its power. Yoshiro Ishikawa’s rich study provides us with an invaluable view of the party’s tortuous formation, and Joshua Fogel has rendered the field a great service by translating this work into English.

Studies of the historical origins of Chinese Communism are of course numerous. But Ishikawa is careful to emphasize that he writes not about Chinese Communism, but specifically about how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was born. The book discusses such questions as the importance of the New Culture Movement, the evolution of socialist thought in China, and specifically of Marxism, but its focus is the Communist Party—the organization, and its people. And since it takes as the subject of its research the actual formation of the Party, it refrains from discussing its subsequent evolution. As Ishikawa modestly writes in his introduction, the book covers a “relatively small event” involving “only about two years, and fewer than one hundred people” (p. 14). Therefore, “This book is not the history of the founding of the party but of its formation” (p. 299).

While this goal is modestly defined the research itself is extensive and thorough. In fact, it is precisely the relatively confined goal that allows the author to delve into extraordinary detail and depth. The author attempts to trace step-by-step the way in which the party was constructed, and to examine each piece of evidence meticulously, along with the attendant scholarship.

The author reconstructs in painstaking detail the founding of the party. He takes various theories advanced over the years, many of them repeated until they have been taken for “conventional wisdom,” and scrutinizes them in light of primary sources, many of which are newly available since the opening of archives in the former Soviet Union and in China in the 1990s. Most of the English-language scholarship on the topic was published from the 1980s to the mid-1990s, and thus did not benefit from these archives and sources, access to which has become limited once more. A key advantage of Ishikawa’s book is its extensive use of Chinese, Japanese, Russian, as well as Korean scholarship. Joshua Fogel’s translation therefore makes available to readers of English not only Ishikawa’s book but also much of the scholarship in these languages as well.

Much of the book then is a discussion of various theories of episodes related to the party’s formation, followed by a close analysis of these theories and their plausibility in light of the available sources. The author often leads the reader along document by document, examining various possible readings of the sources, sharing with the reader his analysis and conclusions.

This careful investigative work leads Ishikawa to critique the extensive reliance of previous scholarship on memoirs. Through his detailed examination of the sources, Ishikawa reveals time and again the extent to which existing narratives of party history often rely on memoirs of participants. These participants are more often than not figures “authorized” or even canonized by the CCP, the very party which is the subject of the memoirs—figures such as Bao Huiseng and Dong Biwu, and of course Mao Zedong. The canonization of these figures led to a canonization of their memoirs as well, although these were the product of fallible human memory. Thus, much subsequent historiography on very concrete questions, such as who, when, and where, relies on memoirs that are inherently problematic as historical sources and were authorized by party officials, while excluding memoirs of figures who might have been central to the events discussed, though not to the subsequent party that emerged.

For example, Ishikawa delves in great detail into the question of who exactly attended the famed First Congress of the party...