How the first revolution affected the second: The setback of 1927 for the Chinese Communist Party Revolution in the 1920s

Abstract

The Bolsheviks’ world revolution encountered setbacks in the 1920s. Among the bloodiest of these was the massacre of 1927 when the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) entire central leadership was killed in the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (GMD) coup. Existing explanations highlight Moscow’s miscalculation, infighting within the Kremlin, Soviet advisers’ information dilemma, and the CCP leaders’ political inexperience. This article compares the opening stages of the Bolshevik (or Russian) and Chinese Communist Party revolutions to explain why the 1927 setback became a catastrophe. It argues that the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 caused fundamental changes, which thwarted any attempt to replicate the 1917 victory in the post-1917 world. The CCP in 1927 faced three disadvantages that the Bolshevik Revolution had engendered: a misleading myth about the October Revolution, a Bolshevized system of repression created by Soviet advisers to the GMD, and the ‘red scare’ in Japan and British Southeast Asia, which blocked members of the CCP from escaping overseas. This article draws on leaders’ biographical materials to compare the two parties’ learning from foreign revolutions, records in suffering repression, and experiences as overseas refugees. The comparison shows that the Bolsheviks did not face these three disadvantages before 1917.