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view of the world, its acceptance had been prepared by anarchist and socialist ideas already current since the nineties. Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu were the progenitors of the Chinese Communist movement. Both were university intellectuals. And, as Luk points out, although Chen Duxiu has been portrayed as a determinist who favoured bourgeois leadership and a bourgeois dominated period after national revolution, this view of him is unfounded. He believed in revolution by the masses and saw, early on, the importance of the peasants as a means of achieving it.
Luk awards a relatively minor role to Mao Zedong in the development of party ideology and buries, once and for all, the simplistic idea propagated by some popular writers that Mao's was the first lone voice that revolution was possible only through the countryside. Mao brought the weight of personal knowledge and experience to bear on the question, but there were others, more influential, who thought as he did.
The greatest difficulty experienced by the Communist party-founders in China was in applying Russian Bolshevik doctrine to a Chinese situation. What did Lenin mean by "feudal conditions"? How important was the Chinese proletariat, numbering only a few millions, even though for the Russians its role was crucial? There were many more such questions giving rise to internal contradictions and differences.
The Communists in China, as we know, joined the Guomindang as a "bloc-within" and in 1927 Chiang Kaishek turned on his unwelcome allies and nearly destroyed them. But despite this catastrophic set back the ideologies already developed in the party were largely maintained. According to Luk, Mao Zedong was later to take over all the main ingredients of the revolutionary model of the 1920s. The major difference now was that the CCP, after 1927, was on the one hand more determined to establish itself as an independent political and military force and on the other hand, was by now well aware of the limits of class struggle and willing to adjust its policies accordingly. It is said that, to carry out revolution successfully, both ideology and organisation are indispensable. By the late nineteen-thirties the CCP had developed both these weapons to a formidable degree.
ANTHONY LAWRENCE