Underground: The Shanghai Communist Party and the Politics of Survival, 1927-1937 (review)

Patricia Stranahan's Underground is a tour de force. Stranahan is a disciplined scholar, who has maintained a tight focus on her subject, the Chinese Communist Party in Shanghai from 1927 to 1937. The period of the 1930s is difficult, and this study therefore deserves, and will receive, much appreciation. This is not a coffee-table book. It is a serious contribution to the study of local politics in Shanghai as well as to the history of the Chinese Communist Party, and specialists on the history and politics of that time will value it for years to come.

Stranahan's thesis is a refutation of the view that cities played only a supporting role in Mao's conquest of the countryside. Her broad range of sources includes most major works in English on the history of the Chinese Communist Party and of the Nanjing Decade as well as much documentation in Chinese. The early chapters rely heavily on Zhang Guotao's (Chang Kuo-t'ao) useful memoir, The Rise of the Chinese Communist Party, 1928-1938. As the work proceeds, the author's most important evidence comes from Chinese primary sources, and the documentation is massive. She has immersed herself in the files of the Shanghai police, in the papers of communist leaders in Shanghai, and in discussions with currently active Chinese scholars and historians of the period.

This energetic researcher has supplied detail that rounds out what has long been known about the experience of the CCP: taking orders from the Comintern or the Soviet Union usually meant disaster. This detail includes tables that show, among other things, changes in the Party hierarchy over the years, the Party dues structure, and the expenses of Party members. She also goes into such matters as the routine jobs and occupations that Party members used as cover while carrying out their more clandestine revolutionary activities. Emphasis on these kinds of subject matter, in addition to the tables themselves, is a major aspect of this work.

The author argues that the Party was more likely to be successful when it acted on its own. Thus, it is not surprising that the history of the Shanghai branch, which had to get along separately and in isolation, mirrors the overall history of the Chinese Communist Party. The author admires and empathizes with the discipline that characterized various leaders and the effect that it had on the way they carried out their duties. This discipline was acquired as a result of the Party's attempts to impose Leninist techniques. However, there is little evidence that communists of the era under study really were thoroughly imbued with Marxist-Leninist ideology. In the last part of the book, Stranahan argues that the communists could succeed only when they functioned as patriots working with other sectors of Chinese society. Patriotism and anti-Japanese sentiment were much more successful than the theoretical and usually impractical directives about making revolution that came down from the top. These generally had little relevance to the daily, often desperate problems and difficulties faced by either the Party members or the workers and other members of the population whom they were trying to persuade. Indeed, when one goes to the PRC these days and asks older CCP members why they became communists, the inevitable response is, "I wanted to fight the Japanese." The author demonstrates these points through her very meticulous documentation.

Stranahan's writing style, however, seldom conveys the drama of the period; the work is somewhat drained of personality. In view of the fact that this was a very chaotic time in China, neither the author nor the individuals discussed and examined here come across with much vividness. For Stranahan, this research effort must have been an exciting and rewarding study, and yet...