Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party - Part 2 The Beginnings of the Chinese Communist Party

Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party
Commentary 2: The Beginnings of the Chinese Communist Party

Foreword

For over five thousand years, the Chinese people created a splendid civilization on the land nurtured by the Yellow River and Yangtze River. During this long period of time, dynasties came and went, and the Chinese culture waxed and waned. Grand and moving stories have played out on the historical stage of China.

The year 1840, the year commonly considered by historians as the beginning of China's contemporary era, marked the start of China's journey from tradition to modernization. Chinese civilization experienced four major episodes of challenge and response. The first three episodes include the invasion of Beijing by the Anglo-French Allied Force in the early 1860s, the Sino-Japanese War in 1894 (also called "Jiawu War"), and the Russo-Japanese War in China's northeast in 1906. To these three episodes of challenge, China responded with the Westernization Movement, which was marked by the importation of modern goods and weapons, institutional reforms through the Hundred Days' Reform in 1898 [1] and the attempt at the end of the late Qing Dynasty to establish constitutional rule, and later, the Xinhai Revolution (or Hsinhai Revolution) [2] in 1911.

At the end of the First World War, China, though it emerged victorious, was not listed among the stronger powers at that time. Many Chinese believed that the first three episodes of response had failed. The May Fourth Movement [3] would lead to the fourth attempt at responding to previous challenges and culminate in the complete westernization of Chinese culture through the communist movement and its extreme revolution.

This article concerns the outcome of the last episode, which is the communist movement and the Communist Party. Let's take a close look at the result of what China chose, or perhaps one can say, what was imposed on China, after over 160 years, nearly 100 million unnatural deaths, and the destruction of nearly all Chinese traditional culture and civilization.