A History Of The Chinese Communist Party 1929-1949

by Jacques Guillermaz, Anne Destenay (Translator)

English, French (translation)

Genres: China, History

477 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1968

About the author

Général Jacques Guillermaz was a French military officer, diplomat and scholar.

Reviews

[Ryan Day · Rating 5 out of 5]

Though Guillermaz provides a great account of the early history of the Chinese Communist Party, I must admit my rating is not as rooted in prose or scholarship as in the historical events themselves. The rise of The Chinese Communist Party, from Shanghai trade unions to peasant armies strong enough to unify a nation of 500 million, a nation that suffered a century of disrespect and decay, is astounding.
The book portrays the party as an ever evolving entity, filled with wrong turns, disasters, lessons and triumphs. It’s not an understatement to call it all a great historical drama, one where the corrupt Koumingtang, foreign imperialists and bloodthirsty Japanese invaders are defeated by the poorest of the poor, guided by men adapting an ideology of global liberation to their own nation’s underdevelopment. Mao Zedong is a figure one cannot help but respect, even when the author himself has misgivings about his leadership. Mao’s focus on rural policy was something that, while obvious now, wasn’t at all clear during his time. Describing him as a genius for being the guy to figure it out would not be unwarranted. It reminds me of the Haitian Revolution, when a rotting upper class, fighting amongst itself, was overthrown by the massive underclass that explodes into revolutionary action, taking the reins of building a new society.
Favorite part: Mao, when visiting Japanese Socialists in the 1960s, tells them not to apologize for invading his country, as without their invasion, the Communists would have never won the civil war. The Chinese death toll from the Japanese invasion was in the hundreds of thousands, making Mao’s comment appear crass, if not insane. I believe he was merely expressing a grim truth, that wars of liberation entail brutal violence, including phases we might call genocide. To hope for such a situation for any country, let alone your own, would be downright suicidal. And yet, as one of Mao’s most apocryphal quotes goes, “Everything under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is excellent.”