A Road Is Made: Communism in Shanghai, 1920-1927

by S.A. Smith

This is a study of the activities, ideas, and internal life of the Chinese Communist Party in Shanghai during its formative period.

Genres: China, History

315 pages, Hardcover

First published August 11, 2000

About the author

Steve (S. A.) Smith is a Senior Research Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and a Professor in the History Faculty of Oxford University. He was formerly Professor of Comparative History at the European University Institute, Florence, and Professor of History at the University of Essex. He is a historian of modern Russia and China, who works on the interface of social and political history and, more recently, of comparative Communism. He has published books on Russian history – including the prize-winning Russia in Revolution: An Empire in Crisis (Oxford, 2017) – and two books on Chinese history, plus Revolution and the People in Russia and China: A Comparative History (Cambridge, 2008). He edited the Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism (Oxford, 2014) and was a co-editor of the Cambridge History of Communism (Cambridge, 2017). He is currently working on a comparative study of the efforts of the Soviet state in the 1920s and 1930s and the Chinese state in the 1950s and 1960s to eliminate popular religion. He is a former editor of Past and Present and a Vice-President of the Past and Present Society. He is also a Fellow of the British Academy.

Reviews

[LaMarx · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Road is Made, by S. A. Smith is a great book for those interested in the early Communist movement in the Republic of China. Comintern policy regarding China in the 1920s was inconsistent. They adopted an almost Menshevist line regarding the national revolution, leading to the bloc from within policy in which Communists would join the GMD. They would sometimes appease Chiang, sometimes push back, and they did not correctly diagnose his political character as the head of the New Right of the GMD until it was too late. Refer to my notes on Revolutionary Nativism to see Chiang’s connections to Chinese fascists.
The Communists in Shanghai lived in a city that much more closely resembled the metropoles of the ‘developed’ world than the interior of China. Communists in China made many gains, made many errors, and suffered greatly. After three failed uprisings, the last aligning more closely with the Wuhan Nationalist Government, Chiang purged the party of Communists, massacred workers with the aid of NRA and Triads, and solidified the Nanjing Decade.
There are lessons to learn from the ways in which the Communists in China acted. However, I find alternate history to be navel gazing and a rather useless endeavor. Neither the totally black view of some Trotskyists nor the apologetics of uncritical Comintern nostalgists gets the picture right, though I would say it is a slightly dark gray. This book is for any Marxist interested in the situation in China during the 20s, the early history of the Party there, and the good and bad of Comintern policy. This book gets four big booms: boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!