Reconstruction and Rectification of the Communist Party in the Shanghai Underground: 1931–34
Recently scholars have shown that Mao's accusations against the Russian Returned Students stemmed from his need to bolster his own legitimacy by discrediting their role in the 1931–34 period. According to the 1945 “Resolution on questions in the history of the Party,” the Returned Students were “doctrinaire sectarians” whose “‘offensive line’ for the Party” and “repeated failures in political work” caused “serious damage to the Party in the White areas.” But closer investigation indicates that in the bastion which they are accused of weakening and decimating, the Returned Students devoted considerable attention to strengthening Party organization, educating cadres and mobilizing mass support. Although factional struggles and aggressive tactics characterized the policies of the Twenty-Eight Bolsheviks in the 1931–34 period, their contributions to the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) eifort to maintain a viable organization in the cities cannot be ignored. That the urban Party, hurt severely by the Kuomintang (KMT), survived at all can be attributed to efforts that Mao later denigrated.
The Civic World of International Communism: Taiwanese communists and the Comintern (1921–1931)*
Abstract The short history of the Taiwanese Communist Party (Taiwan gongchandang 台 灣 共 產 黨) (1928–1931) offers a window into the negotiative polity of international communism during the Third Period (1928–1934). The Party was established during the time when the Comintern intensified its operations in colonies and promoted the organization of communist parties there. Its demise was the result of government suppression that occurred as a reaction to their increased public activity in 1931, allegedly at the direction of the Comintern. This paper examines the Comintern's role in the Taiwanese communist movement and shows that the Taiwanese communists were active agents (rather than passive tools) in their relationship with the Comintern.
The Use of Radio in China
The very size of China has imposed on all who would rule it the twin problems of unification and control. Indeed the very first Chinese Emperor, as opposed to Kings among Kings, Ch'in Shih-huang (d. 210 b.c.) achieved the hegemony and his right to this title by being the first to solve these problems. Their continuing intractability in China, despite the mould of history and the unifying cement of the Chinese script, is reflected in Sun Yat-sen's description of the Chinese people more than 2,000 years later as “loose sand.” Ch'in Shih-huang had the stern admonitions of the Legalists as his aid to unification and Sun Yat-sen revolutionary fervour as his. There is no doubt that both or, for that matter, any other would-be ruler in between these two ends of the time scale in China, would have seized on radio as an additional aid, had its potentialities been available to them. Given this basic Chinese problem of unification and control, the failure of the Kuomintang to exploit radio on any effective scale is therefore surprising. China's latest rulers, faced not only with this old problem but also with a new ideology to spread and a new orthodoxy to engender, have naturally sought to exploit it to the full.