Red Tourism: The First National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party

Originally posted 15th April 2015

by The Pearl

The first time that we went to Xintiandi was one weekend afternoon.  Richard had been taken there for work the previous week and I had not done any research on what to expect, so I was flying blind as it were. As we were wandering around we came across this squad of government guards.  The uniforms were very similar to the ones all officials wore in China when I visited in the 1980s and I was tickled to see them marching past a Rolls Royce.  It all seemed a bit incongruous but that is what China is today.  We thought that they must be going somewhere important so we followed them to this row of Shikumen Houses which happened to be, I now know, in the same street as the Shikumen Open House Museum.  Joining the end of the queue we found ourselves to be entering the building where the First National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party was held.  We went through a tight security system with x-ray machines.  These are used at all metro stations and the major museums in Shanghai, but not, interestingly enough, at the houses where Chairman Mao lived whilst staying in Shanghai, or those of other founding party members.  However the house of Soong Qingling, Madame Sun Yat-sen and that of Dr. Sun Yat-sen and Zhou Enlai do have guards at the gate.  Read into that what you will.
I have delayed writing this piece for sometime.  It may be to do with the fact that I have found it hard to find a consistent story that hangs together well.  This might be because I do not understand the history of the Chinese Communist Party, or that my view has been tainted by the excellent books of Jung Chang (of Wild Swans fame): The Empress Dowager Cixi and Mao: The Unknown Story.  My daughter tells me that her books do not stand up to academic scrutiny as although she cites many references, they are spoken testimonies and not from written works.  But I have read all three of these books and they have helped me to understand China better.  I have seen Wild Swans for sale here in Shanghai.  I have seen neither of the others.  I suspect both might have been banned.
The tour started with an exhibition and then went on into the house itself.

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Map of Shanghai showing The Chinese Old City outlined in Black and the much larger International Settlements.

The Exhibition started with a map of Shanghai from the early 20th Century showing the Old City with the old city walls outlined in black.  As you can see at the time of the map the Old City full of Chinese and governed by the Chinese is significantly smaller than the other areas.  Directly to the west is the French Concession, north of the that the British Settlement (which went originally only as far west from the river as the Western Wall of the Old City), shown in blue and lying out along the Huangpu river to the north east is the American Settlement which in 1863

Chen Huacheng

combined with the British Settlement to become the International Settlement. This was originally only for foreigners and always governed by foreigners – mainly the British.  The first settlement was established by the British in 1842 at the end of the First Opium War whereby the British with the Treaty of Nanking established five treaty ports (in addition to Hong Kong which was ceded to Britain at the same time), opening up China to trade.  Well that’s how the British see it.  How the Chinese see it, as is obvious from this and other exhibitions we have seen, is that the British Imperialists started  The Century of Humiliation of a great nation, The Middle Kingdom.  The exhibition showed us the portrait of Chen Huacheng in military uniform.  He was military commander of the Southern Region to the Yangtze River and sacrificed his life defending the Wusong Fort in Shanghai in 1842.  (He is commemorated as a Town God in the Temple of the Town Gods near the Yuyuan Gardens). Following on from the signing of the Nanjing Treaty, China agreed to the setting up of the French and American Settlements to avoid Britain having a monopoly of trade with China.

Boundary Plate for International Settlement

Boundary Stone for British Settlement

Sovereignty for these areas was handed over to the Westerners by the Qing government following the help that the Imperialists gave in defeating The Small Sword Society uprising in 1853-55. Boundary plates such as this were used to delineate the beginning and end of Chinese land.

Police weapons

During the Taiping Rebellion (during which 20 million died in the crushed southern uprising against the Qing Dynasty) so many Chinese poured into Shanghai for protection that the Old City could no longer cope with the numbers and the Settlement relaxed its rules in only allowing foreigners to reside within its boundaries, but no Chinese could sit on the municipal council.  Law and order within the International Settlement was maintained by its own police force with

Nanjing Road East, International Settlement, with shops closed during May 4th Movement

truncheons and whips, often used to control the Chinese.
It is a bit disconcerting as we go around Shanghai to have our Imperialist past rubbed in our faces; and it is the British that come under particular attack.  I think this view of the British Imperialists has tainted the Sino-British relationship ever since.  And as I go about Shanghai I see few British brands, compared with say Italian and American ones.  Is this due to our poor history with China or are we just nowadays very bad at exporting?  Originally we wanted tea, silk and porcelain.  Self-sufficient China needed nothing.  All that could be traded for these items was silver, and was we drank more and more tea the amount of silver in Britain was becoming seriously depleted.  Eventually we hit on the idea of becoming the drug barons of the day by trading opium from British India, which we duly did and the balance of trade then tipped heavily in our favour.  The British then kicked up a fuss as 20,000 chests of the opium were impounded when China became alarmed at the flow of silver leaving China to pay for the narcotic and we went to war over it.  We won and negotiated the Treating of Nanking (Nanjing) in which five ports were opened up for foreign trade and residence and Hong Kong was handed over as a free and open port. The humiliation and weakening of the Qing Dynasty that this brought about, in the words of the PRC in 1976, that:

the Opium War in which the Chinese people fought against British aggression, marked the beginning of modern Chinese history and the start of the Chinese people’s bourgeois-democratic revolution against imperialism and feudalism.

Did the humiliation and successive weakening of the Qing Dynasty eventually lead to it being eventually overthrown? Yes.  Was trade in opium reprehensible; of course. Has the average Chinese benefited from the revolution?  Those that survived and their offspring have, although millions upon millions died in the process.  Without the opium would China ever have opened up to the outside world?  I think some other nation, such as Japan in its expansionist phase would have forced their hand, without Britain’s earlier help.  Does The Middle Kingdom now benefit from international trade and modern western ideas? I believe so.  Has the Century of Humiliation ended?  Chiang Kai-Shek and Mao Zedong declared that it had at the end of World War II, but the Beijing Olympics were also said to have marked the end. And Jane Elliot has questioned was the average 19th Century Chinese peasant (90% of the population) ever humiliated by the wars in the first place?

Dr Sun Yat-sen in 1912 in Jiaxing with representatives of various circles

Dr Sun Yat-sen is described in the exhibition as a native of Guangdong Province and leader of the Chinese modern bourgeois revolution and great revolutionary forerunner.  In 1912 the Last Emperor of China, Puyi, abdicated.  Dr. Sun had been the Provisional President of China since December the previous year and had stepped down a few months later in the spring of 1912 in favour of Yuan Shikai the army leader who forced the Emperor’s abdication.  Dr Sun is pictured here dressed in a fur-collared coat in Jiaxing in December 1912 with people involved in establishing the National Assembly, the first ever democratic vote in China, in which however only one per cent of people voted (due to gender, property, tax, residential, and literacy requirements), but nevertheless involved 300 civic groups.  During the ensuing year, although this first election gave the Kuomintang a majority of seats in the first ever elections in China, the former military leader President Yuan Shikai assumed dictatorial power.

Numbers of the Working Class

Zhou Enlai et al as French Students

The Site of the Shanghai Machinery Union

The exhibition showed us how the Chinese working class developed in the early years, reaching 2.6 million in 1919. (The 1910 population census gives a total figure for China as 439,214,000).  We were also shown a photograph of Zhou Enlai  (second from right) and three others in spring 1921 as students in France where they set up an early organisation of the Chinese Communist Party and the former site of Shanghai Machinery Union the site of the first Union in Shanghai in November 1920, again said to be set up by the early CPC. I understand, if memory serves me right, that Dr Sun was instrumental in getting this group to get a French University education.  Wikipedia tells me that the CPC was founded by Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu, who took inspiration from the earlier Russian Revolution, which combined with resentment of the Imperialists and the treatment of China in the Treaty of Versailles in which Shandong, an ex-German controlled area of China, was handed over to the Japanese, generated the idea of a Chinese revolution and which started on 4th May 1919 in protest of the unfair treatment by the Western Powers carving up the World at the French Palace.  But neither of these two men could make the 1st National Congress Meeting of the CPC at the end of July in 1921.

Tableau showing Mao Zedong

Seating plan of Tableau

At this meeting, held in the building next door to the exhibition site, which was at the time a girls school closed for the summer, 13 delegates representing 53 Party members gathered, together with 2 members of Comintern.  The exhibition shows a tableau with Mao Zedong standing as he addresses the meeting.  This gives Mao Zedong, the son of a wealthy farmer of peasant stock from Hunan,  a prominence in proceedings, which Jung Chang challenges in her book, although she agrees that he was there.
Seven days into the Congress and the French Concession police moved in and broke up the meeting and for the final day it was reconvened on a pleasure boat on the South Lake at Jiaxing County  Zhejiang Province.

Interior of the Pleasure Boat

The Pleasure Boat

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The Shikumen Lilong and the room in the Girls’ school where the meeting was held:

The lilong of Shikumen Houses and the Girls’ school on the LHS

The Tiny Meeting room of the 1st CPC National Congress

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“China Sex By Age 2010 census” by Rickky1409 – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Slightly off topic but interesting given the  above on the population of the country in 1910 of around 439 million I have found the following.  The total population for China from the census in 2010 is 1,339,724,852.  From the early 1950s Communist China has introduced both family planning and population control with varying degrees of success.  With infant mortality declining significantly since the revolution and the average life expectancy growing dramatically the country has had to control its rapidly increasing population.  In 1949 the average life expectancy was only 35 years.  Since the early 1950s mortality has steadily declined, but “The computer model showed that the crude death rate increased dramatically during the famine years associated with the Great Leap Forward (1958–60).”  In the 1960s the virtues of later marriage were expounded and in 1972/3 barefoot doctors went around the communes distributing control.
In 2010 women had an average of 1.9 children versus an estimated 7.6 children in 1971.
The age distribution diagram shows the narrowing at the very bottom and is the effect of the Chinese Communist Party’s one child policy on the birth rate.  The effect of parents’ preference for boy babies over baby girls is shown in dark blue, and it has been estimated that this will lead to a 24 million bride shortage by 2020.  This is also leading China into a crisis of an ageing population, similar but much bigger than that of the West, and especially in this society where it is an offspring’s duty to provide for its parents and its grandparents.