This year, the ninety-one million members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) are celebrating the centenary of the party’s First Congress in July 1921, which was attended by just twelve delegates from seven regions, and which claimed to represent a national membership of fifty-three.

The First Congress has served as a founding myth for the CCP — not least because of the presence of Mao Zedong, who through the 1920s was a second-ranking leader of the party. The myth has undergone readjustment in the light of political events: for example, Chen Duxiu, elected the party’s first general secretary, was later expelled, and became a Trotskyist; around half the founding delegates subsequently left the party; and the role of the Soviet-controlled Comintern in bringing about the congress was a rather sore issue.

A hundred years on, it is a good moment to look at the creation of the CCP and at the first phase of its history, when the party was in a united front with the Nationalist Party (Guomindang), and principally oriented toward organizing the working class. The national revolution that got underway between 1925 and 1927 largely reunified the country. The CCP and the left wing of the Guomindang (GMD) carried out a substantial mobilization of workers, peasants, young people, and women in the areas liberated by the National Revolutionary Army (NRA).