Forging Leninism in China. Mao and the Remaking of the Chinese Communist Party, 1927–1934.

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Europe-Asia Studies
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Forging Leninism in China. Mao and the Remaking
of the Chinese Communist Party, 1927–1934
Joseph Fewsmith, Cambridge & New York, NY: Cambridge University Press,
2022, 224pp., £24.00 ebook.
Emre Demir
To cite this article: Emre Demir (2024) Forging Leninism in China. Mao and the Remaking
of the Chinese Communist Party, 1927–1934, Europe-Asia Studies, 76:5, 820-822, DOI:
10.1080/09668136.2024.2339735
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2024.2339735
Published online: 24 May 2024.
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Although Russia has introduced many retrograde laws in recent years, the more serious challenges
to the development of a rule of law in the country lie in the selective or distorted application of the law
by state officials, inspired both by crude self-interest and ‘ingrained practices [and] informal norms’
(p. 23). A case in point is Article 356 of the Russian Criminal Code, under which individuals can be
prosecuted for ‘cruel treatment of prisoners of war or civilians, deportation of civilian populations,
[or] plunder of national property in occupied territories’(p. 410). Russia’s Criminal Investigative
Committee has sought to prosecute combatants in the war in Ukraine under this article, but the year
was 2014 and the defendants were Ukrainians in the Donbas region. How and against whom one
applies the law matters.
EUGENE HUSKEY, Professor Emeritus, Stetson University, USA. Email: ehuskey@stetson.edu
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3527-2300
https://doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2024.2339745 EUGENE HUSKEY © 2024
Joseph Fewsmith, Forging Leninism in China. Mao and the Remaking of the Chinese Communist Party,
1927–1934. Cambridge & New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2022, 224pp., £24.00 ebook.
THE CONVENTIONAL HISTORY OF THE EARLY YEARS OF China’s revolutionary era usually
focuses on the central role of Mao Zedong, ignoring that played by local revolutionaries such as the
revolutionaries of the Donggu Revolutionary Base Area in Jiangxi. By directing attention to local
revolutionaries and their relationship to non-local revolutionary forces, Joseph Fewsmith’s latest
book makes an important contribution to our knowledge of the early years of the Communist Party
of China (CPC), showing how the CPC transformed itself from a shattered revolutionary movement
into a disciplined, ideologically-driven Leninist party after 1927.
The introduction presents the author’s three main arguments. First, the collapse of the United Front
in April 1927 led to the near demise of the CPC. The party had lost much of its organisational coherence
and split into three sub-levels: the Centre in Shanghai, provincial party committees, and party
organisations in townships and villages. In the late 1920s, the Centre lacked the means to support
the lower levels as well as the capacity to exert strict control. Consequently, almost all truly
grassroots party organisations were developed by educated local youth, who introduced Marxism to
the countryside. As outsiders, Mao and his forces could only penetrate local society through these
grassroots party organisations. However, once successful, Mao turned on these local communists,
eliminated them and took control of their organisations. Eventually, he transformed the CPC into a
Leninist party, a highly hierarchical, disciplined, violent and militarised organisation, far exceeding
anything envisioned in 1927.
Chapter 1 analyses the leadership and policy changes within the CPC in the post-1927 era and the
role played by educated local youth in building party organisations and leading insurrections in rural
China. The development of the Leninist party structure resulted from a process of experimenting
with alternative strategies. The purge of 12 April 1927, when the CPC was violently suppressed by
nationalist forces under Chiang Kai-shek, led to a change in leadership and strategy. The Comintern
replaced Chen Duxiu with Qu Qiubai as the effective head of the party. Despite evidence to the
contrary, the new leadership claimed that China was experiencing a revolutionary high tide and
decided to implement a policy of insurrections (baodong). Local communists were instructed to
organise the peasant masses to seize power in the cities. However, most uprisings failed, as the
leadership’s assessment that the countryside was on the brink of revolution was incorrect. The only
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groups that were effective in raising political awareness, introducing socialist ideology at the grassroots
level, and carrying out successful uprisings were those organised by educated local youth. They were
members of the middle or lower landlord class or rich peasant families and had at least a higher
elementary education, which earned them the respect of the peasantry.
Chapter 2 expands on these themes, focusing on the Donggu Revolutionary Base Area. A
revolutionary base area, a unique contribution of the Chinese revolution to Marxist terminology and
revolutionary practice, is a stronghold controlled and used by revolutionary forces to conduct
cultural, economic, military and social revolutionary experiments and to organise local community
and military forces to wage attacks against territories controlled by the nationalist forces. Young
people returned to their native villages from the cities to introduce socialist ideology and build up
the CPC amongst the peasant masses, with the aim of fomenting and leading insurrection. This
contrasted with failed attempts by cadres from other areas to impose revolutionary change. Local
leaders were aware of local conditions and the needs of the peasantry. Additionally, they were able
to use their privileged position in the rural community to gain the support of the masses. Their
approach contrasted with the revolutionary methods favoured by outsiders like Mao, such as
enforcing land reform without considering local conditions and relationships.
Chapter 3 details Mao’s land policy, which aimed to eliminate local strongmen and the clan system.
Here, the author also discusses Mao’s controversial efforts to build a party army to carry out a revolution
and his unsuccessful attempt to implement his ideas in the Jinggangshan Revolutionary Base Area.
Although the Party Centre supported the use of violence to achieve revolution, it opposed relying on
military force, regarding this as ‘military adventurism’(p. 75). Instead, the revolution needed to rely on
the strength of the masses, with military force only serving as a supplement. Despite Mao’s initial retreat
in his opposition to the Centre’s position on the centrality of military force, he ultimately triumphed,
with Zhou Enlai’s support. The Gutian Conference in December 1929 marked an important step in
developing a Leninist party system by disciplining both the party and the army, asserting the party’s
authority over the army, and implementing a top-down decision-making process.
Chapter 4 explains how Mao and other outsiders purged local leaders in the southwest Jiangxi party
organisations, including the Donggu Revolutionary Base Area. This is the story of a clash between two
opposing revolutionary visions. Mao’s national revolutionary vision reorganised the CPC by purging
from the party ranks all small landlords and rich peasants, seen by Mao as obstacles to revolution.
Land redistribution played a crucial role in this vision. Additionally, Mao used the ‘discovery’of the
non-existent AB (Anti-Bolshevik) Corps to eliminate local leaders, in the process ‘destroy[ing] the
social organisation of local society and forg[ing] Leninist rule’(p. 139). Based on the work of Dai
Xiangqing and Luo Huilan, Fewsmith states that the AB Corps were eliminated in 1927 and there is
no proof of the existence of AB Corps within the CPC ranks in the 1930s, when the campaign
against them was put in place. However, many in the party, including Mao himself, used the idea as
an excuse for eliminating their rivals.
Chapter 5 explains the logic of the sufan (suppression) campaign, which was implemented against
suspected AB Corps members and other counterrevolutionaries, in order to wipe them out of local party
organisations, and the efforts of the Party Centre to control it. The sufan movement was not limited to
Jiangxi, and the CPC used it to suppress enemies of the revolution in other base areas, including the
Eyuwan Base Area in Henan. The party saw counterrevolutionaries everywhere. In January 1931,
the newly appointed party leadership, who had been trained in the Soviet Union and witnessed the
brutality of Stalin’s purges, was an important force behind the continued violence. As a result of the
campaign, which significantly contributed to the defeat of the communist movement in Jiangxi, tens
of thousands of CPC members were executed, normal party work was hindered, and peasants were
alienated from the party army. It is precisely for this reason that Zhou Enlai tried to take the sufan
campaign from local revolutionaries’control to central control.
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Fewsmith’s account of China’s post-1927 revolutionary history is a valuable contribution to the
literature on the CPC. His focus on the struggles between local revolutionaries and Mao’s‘outside’
forces, as well as the conflict between Mao and the Party Centre, provides a rigorous analysis of the
building of the Leninist party organisation under Mao’s leadership.
EMRE DEMIR, Assistant Professor, Political Science and International Relations Department, TED
University, Ankara, Turkey; Visiting Scholar, History Department, New York University, New York,
USA. Email: emre.demir@tedu.edu.tr http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9580-863X
https://doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2024.2339735 EMRE DEMIR © 2024
Emily H. C. Chua, The Currency of Truth. Newsmaking and the Late-Socialist Imaginaries of China’s
Digital Era. Ann Harbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2023, x + 176pp., $70.00 h/b.
THE CURRENCY OF TRUTH PROVIDES A COMPELLING AND INSIGHTFUL analysis of the process of
news creation in contemporary China, based on the author’s understanding of news as a form of
currency. Over a year of fieldwork as an intern in the politics section of a state-owned newspaper
based in Guangzhou and Beijing, referred to pseudonymously as The Times, supplemented by eight
years of follow-up interviews, Emily Chua’s ethnographic study reveals intricate professional and
interpersonal mechanisms within the media industry. Focused on contemporary postsocialist China
under the leadership of Xi Jinping, the work challenges conventional theoretical perspectives on
global media in the present era.
Chua’s perspective redirects attention from the conventional focus on how the media impacts
citizens to an exploration of how ‘newsmakers’(the author’s term for the media) perceive their
work (p. 4). She transcends the dichotomy present in Chinese media scholarship, which categorises
news as either the ‘public’s provider of truthful and important information’(p. 5) or ‘the Party’s
trusty and reliable mouthpiece’(p. 4). Instead, Chua unveils the role of news as a medium
predominantly defined by its transactional function, mediating ‘the myriad agreements and
transactions that the news industry’s numerous players were constantly brokering with one another’
(p. 4), rather than solely by its ability to inform.
The book unfolds across six chapters. In the introduction, Chua provides an overview of her
ethnographic method and situates her contribution within the broader context of media studies, both
in China and globally. Here, she introduces her central thesis of news as currency and previews the
subsequent chapters. The second chapter traces the historical evolution of news and media in China
from before the establishment of the People’s Republic to the present day, detailing the varying
degrees of control and freedom imposed by the Communist Party of China (CPC). In the subsequent
sections, Chua explores specific episodes that underscore key elements constituting her argument. In
the third chapter, she examines the process of gathering material for propaganda articles on a key
political event, as well as the practices of crafting ‘soft’(ruǎn) and ‘black’(hēi) articles that present
companies in a particularly positive or negative light. Chua effectively shows that the value of The
Times and other news outlets in China is rooted in their ‘publicness’, namely, ‘the idea of The Times
as a newspaper that pitched itself to the right audience and in the right way’(p. 59). She observes
that these newsmaking practices are carried out as a form of negotiation, either to secure the support
of local Party officials or to generate revenues from companies willing to pay for a favourable
portrayal or to avoid a negative one. The significance lies not merely in the effective readership of
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