The Birth Of The Party
After the 1911 Revolution, also known as the Chinese Revolution or the Xinhai Revolution, where power was wrestled away from the Xuantong Emperor, the last of the Qing dynasty to form a republican government, it would only take 10 years for that to collapse into chaos.
In an atmosphere still darkened by infighting between powerful warlords and a famine in the north that was killing hundreds of thousands, the Nationalist Party, also known as Kuomintang (KMT) were attempting, an ultimately failing, to reunify the country under a central government. It was then that small groups, inspired by Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, became interested in the communist ideology.
The aforementioned 13 members in Shanghai, met for the first time on July 23, 1921, made their intentions (according to the official history) “to overthrow the bourgeoisie by means of the revolutionary army of the proletariat,” very clear. By the time 1949 and the founding of the People’s Republic of China came around, only two men from that original meeting were still standing, Dong Biwu and of course, Mao Zedong.
