Free Mao Zedong by Jonathan Spence Page A

author and reliability cannot be ascertained. It appears that each of the local groups gave a report on their activities and emphasized the small size of their membership and the need to expand. Maring spoke of his work in Indonesia and underscored the need to develop the labor movement in China; Nikolsky described the founding of the Far Eastern Secretariat of the Comintern in Irkutsk, and also the situation inside the Soviet Union.
    The most important discussion seems to have focused on whether to break altogether with bourgeois society or to find a link between open work and secret work that would let the Party operate more openly in society. Congressional delegates argued that workers should be encouraged to “expand their outlook” and take part in “the struggle for freedom of publication and assembly.” Open propagation of Communist theories was “an absolute condition for success”—though at the same time it was “futile to hope to build a new society within the old system.” Ultimately the working class would have to learn how to liberate itself because it was not possible “to force it to carry out revolution.” On the last day of the congress, without the Comintern representatives present, the Chinese argued over what exactly was meant by the proletariat’s “allying with other parties and factions,” and whether the warlords were the most important enemy. After “short but intense debate” it was recommended that for the immediate future the focus of the Communist Party should be on organizing factory workers. Organizing the peasantry and the army should wait until there were more Party members available—such members should be especially sought out in the working class.
    The final “program” of the Party, on which all were said to agree, stated that the capitalist class must be overthrown and a classless society established inside China. Machinery, land, buildings, and other means of production would be under “social ownership.” Membership in the Party would not be restricted by gender or nationality. It was enough that each new member have the backing of a preexisting Party member, with background checking of suitability for membership not to exceed two months. Party doctrines and membership lists were to be kept secret. Any area of China where there were five members could form its own unit, called a “Soviet.” Soviets with more than thirty members would form their own executive committees. Finances, Party policies, and publications would all be supervised by the Central Committee of the Party, of which Chen Duxiu would be the general secretary.
    Mao Zedong was back in Changsha by early August 1921, having been instructed at the congress to build up the Party in Hunan. His first response to this order, in line with his earlier experiences, was to announce on August 16 the formation of a “Hunan Self-Study University.” On the surface this was to run somewhat along the lines of the old dynasty’s Confucian study academies—it literally met on the premises of one such academy in Changsha that had been founded in the late Qing to propagate the thought of an earlier Chinese patriotic thinker opposed to the Manchu conquest of 1644. This location was made possible by the fact that Mao’s fellow Communist delegate from Hunan, the fifty-one-year-old scholar He Shuheng, had been named director of the academy, and the Hunan government had provided it with a monthly stipend of 400 Chinese dollars. The goal of the new university, Mao stated, was to get away from the “mechanical conformity of teaching methods” still all too common, and to form a fully “democratic” community that would “strive to smash the mystery of learning” and be affordable for all. “Correspondents” appointed by the university would keep the students in touch with intellectual developments worldwide (New York, London, Paris, Moscow, and Tokyo were among those places mentioned) and also in schools throughout