July 23, 1921 - Early Meetings of the Chinese Communist Party Continue in Shanghai

On July 23, 1921, you're watching history unfold as roughly 12–13 delegates secretly open the First National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party inside a Shanghai rowhouse. They've gathered in the French Concession, where extraterritorial immunity shields them from Chinese law. Comintern representatives from Moscow are present, regional updates are shared, and a radical new party begins taking shape. There's far more to this founding story than a single day's meeting.

Key Takeaways

• On July 23, 1921, the First National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party officially opened in Shanghai's French Concession.
• Approximately 12–13 delegates representing roughly 50–59 Party members nationwide attended, including Mao Zedong and Zhang Guotao.
• Two Comintern representatives, Henk Sneevliet and Vladimir Neiman, actively participated to shape a Leninist vanguard party aligned with Moscow.
• Opening-day proceedings included Comintern speeches and regional updates from delegates representing cities across China and Japan.
• A spy infiltrated the meeting on July 30, prompting French police to raid the venue and forcing delegates to relocate to Jiaxing.

Why Shanghai's French Concession Was the Perfect Cover?

When the Chinese Communist Party needed a place to hold its first congress in 1921, Shanghai's French Concession checked every box. Extraterritorial Immunity meant Chinese national law didn't apply there, shielding delegates from Beijing's police and regional warlords. French authorities cared more about protecting commercial interests than monitoring radical Chinese political groups, so early sessions went largely undisturbed.

Architectural Camouflage worked just as effectively. Delegates met inside a Shikumen-style rowhouse at No. 76 Xingye Road, owned by Li Hanjun's brother. It looked like an ordinary family gathering in a residential neighborhood.

The area's European-Chinese hybrid character, proximity to schools, and dense urban surroundings made blending in effortless. You'd never guess a revolutionary congress was unfolding behind those walls. The congress brought together 13 delegates, representing a party whose founding mission was national liberation and freeing China from the grip of foreign imperialism.

The French Concession had long attracted writers, intellectuals, and political dissidents who relied on its autonomous character to operate beyond the reach of Qing and later Nationalist surveillance, making it a natural haven for early communist underground networks.

The Delegates Who Founded the CCP on July 23, 1921

Gathering in that Shikumen rowhouse on July 23, 1921, somewhere between 12 and 13 delegates represented roughly 50 to 59 Communist Party members scattered across China. The count depends on whether you include Bao Huiseng, appointed by Chen Duxiu. Notably, both Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao were absent, despite being the party's primary founders.

You'd find delegates from Shanghai, Beijing, Changsha, Wuhan, Jinan, Guangzhou, and even Japan. Mao Zedong represented Changsha, while Zhang Guotao came from Beijing. Of these founders, only Mao and Dong Biwu survived to witness the 1949 PRC proclamation.

Seven eventually left the CCP, three died fighting for the cause, and one died from illness — a turbulent fate for China's founding revolutionaries. Two Communist International representatives, Malin and Nicolsky, were also present at the Congress alongside the Chinese delegates.

The congress adopted The First Program of the Communist Party of China, which outlined the party's core objectives, including its intent to overthrow capitalist class power, eradicate private ownership of property, and formally join the Comintern.

What Actually Happened on the Congress's First Day?

On July 23, 1921, delegates filed into a tidy grey brick house at 108 Wantze Road in Shanghai's French Concession — a building owned by Li Hanjun's brother — and opened the founding congress of the Chinese Communist Party.

Two Comintern representatives, Malin and Nicolsky, reportedly delivered speeches before the session turned to regional updates.

Delegates from Shanghai, Beijing, Wuhan, Changsha, Guangzhou, Jinan, and Japan shared information about their local communist groups, outlining membership numbers and organizational status.

This exchange gave the congress a nationwide picture of the movement's development.

The opening day didn't yet produce drafting discussions — those came in the days that followed — but it established the essential groundwork for officially building the Communist Party of China. Much like Jacques Cartier's 1534 voyage, which began under a royal commission before expanding into broader territorial and political consequences, the congress's modest opening proceedings would set in motion a transformation far exceeding its initial scope. In total, thirteen delegates attended the congress, representing communist groups from across the country. The delegates collectively represented more than 50 Party members spread across the country's various regional organizations.

Why Moscow Sent Two Men to Oversee the Congress?

Though the founding congress officially belonged to the Chinese delegates, Moscow didn't leave its outcome to chance. The Comintern sent two representatives to guarantee Soviet coordination from the inside: Henk Sneevliet, a Dutch communist operating under the alias Maring, and Vladimir Neiman, known as Nikolsky.

Their presence wasn't ceremonial. Maring had already helped Zhang Guotao organize the congress's groundwork, and both men attended the secret Shanghai sessions directly. Comintern oversight meant ensuring the CCP emerged as a disciplined, Leninist vanguard party aligned with Moscow's global strategy.

You can see the power dynamic clearly: Moscow needed a reliable partner in Asia, and these two men were there to shape exactly what kind of party the CCP would become. The founding congress brought together only about 12 attendees representing a party of approximately 50 members. The same wartime period that shaped the CCP's early years also saw unlikely inventors like Hedy Lamarr develop frequency-hopping communication systems to counter Axis military advantages. Maring's commitment to communist resistance didn't end in China — he was executed by the Germans in 1942 for his involvement in the communist resistance to the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands.

How French Police Nearly Derailed the Whole Congress?

Moscow's men weren't the only outside force shaping the congress's fate. On July 30, a Chinese spy slipped into the meeting premises, noticed the suspicious gathering, and tipped off French Concession authorities. Police raided the building that same night, shattering the delegates' confidence in their meeting secrecy.

Though no one was arrested, the intrusion made continuing at that location impossible. You'd have abandoned it too — thirteen representatives and two Comintern advisers sitting in a compromised safe house weren't safe at all. The delegates immediately agreed to relocate to South Lake in Jiaxing, roughly 100 kilometers away, where they rented a tourist houseboat to finish their work.

That police surveillance nearly ended the congress before China's founding communist party platform could be completed. The final session was held aboard a vessel known as the Red Boat, where the delegates concluded the First National Congress of the Communist Party of China. The original meeting building, a Shikumen-style structure, still stands today at No.76 Xingye Road in what was once the French Concession of Shanghai.

What the First Party Program Actually Demanded

The delegates who scrambled onto that Jiaxing houseboat weren't just finishing procedural business — they were finalizing a document that demanded nothing less than total systemic destruction. The program called for seizing machinery, land, factory buildings, and all means of production. It wasn't subtle about intentions.

You'd find no gradual reform language here. The text demanded a revolutionary army join the proletariat to overthrow capitalist rule directly, with class abolition as the explicit endpoint. The soviet model shaped their governance vision — proletarian dictatorship would hold until the class struggle concluded permanently.

Membership rules reinforced this radical posture. Soldiers and police couldn't join. Party members needed special approval before accepting government roles. This wasn't a reform movement. It was a blueprint for dismantling everything that existed. Modern efforts to study these founding documents online are sometimes slowed by tools like Anubis, which uses proof-of-work schemes to raise the cost of mass automated scraping.

The Party that emerged from these early meetings would later define itself as the vanguard of the Chinese working class, representing the developmental demands of advanced productive forces and the fundamental interests of the greatest possible majority of the Chinese people.

Who Was Elected to Lead the New Chinese Communist Party?

Curiously, the man elected to lead the Chinese Communist Party wasn't even in the room. The 12 delegates at Shanghai's First National Congress chose Chen Duxiu as general secretary despite his absence, sending his representative Bao Huiseng in his place. Co-founder Li Dazhao also skipped the proceedings entirely.

The congress established Central Bureau mechanisms by electing a three-member leadership body comprising Chen Duxiu, Zhang Guotao, and Li Da. Chen headed this bureau, which became the CCP's first central leadership organ, meeting secretly in Shanghai's French Concession.

You'd find it striking that the party's organizational founder shaped its direction without attending its birth. Chen held his leadership role until 1929, when the party expelled him for his Trotskyite views and criticism of Stalin. Among the delegates who did attend the congress was Mao Zedong, who would go on to become the dominant figure in the party following the Zunyi conference during the Long March.

The congress was attended by 13 delegates in total, representing the small Marxist groups that had formed across China in cities including Shanghai, Beijing, Changsha, Wuhan, Guangzhou, and Jinan. Notably, the congress rejected Lenin's advice to accept a temporary alliance with bourgeois democrats, instead adopting the orthodox Marxist belief that only the urban proletariat could lead a socialist revolution.

Why Mao Later Changed the Official Founding Date to July 1?

When party leadership convened in 1938 to establish an official founding commemoration, they faced an inconvenient problem: no one could remember the exact date of the First National Congress, and no written records had survived to settle the matter. Mao and his colleagues couldn't reconcile inconsistent oral accounts, so they practiced calendar politics and simply chose July 1 for administrative convenience. That's founding mythmaking in action. Participants were only fairly certain the meeting had occurred sometime in July 1921, and it wasn't until a late 1950s Russian-language report surfaced that July 23 could be identified as the actual opening date of the Congress. Notably, the Congress was held in Shanghai's French Concession, a detail that underscores the precarious secrecy under which the party's earliest gatherings took place.