ABSTRACT
The Early Years: 1919-1923 The founding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) resulted from the convergence of two events: the victory of the Bolsheviks in Russia in 1917, and the rising wave of nationalism in China in the wake of the Versailles settlement in 1919. Neither was a sufficient cause in itself. Issues of the most prestigious intellectual journal of the time, Xin Qingnian, or New Youth, that appeared just before the Versailles settlement contained several articles critical of Karl Marx’s thought. Apart from any doubts about its validity in other areas of the world, the authors considered Marxism inapplicable to China because the country’s proletarian class was so small. The next issue of New Youth, which was compiled after the Versailles Treaty and during the May Fourth movement, took a completely different tack. In effect, the post-World War I settlement had corroborated Marx: The bourgeois-capitalist states had behaved in exactly as exploitative a fashion as one might predict from his writings.
