Culture, political movement, and revolution: The formation of the Chinese communist movement in the Chongqing region, 1890-1926.

Abstract

U.S. scholarship on the origins of the Chinese communist revolution has been focused primarily on the political dimension and on the May Fourth period. The rise of the Chinese communist revolution is viewed as a special and isolated political and intellectual phenomenon, with very little connection to China's everyday life, to China's social and cultural environment at the time and to the revolutionary precursors of the May Fourth era. Lack of examination of these factors results in a failure to recognize the complexity of the rise of Chinese communism. In this study the rise of the early Chinese communist movement in the Chongqing region is conceptualized as a result of an ongoing revolutionary process during the first two decades of the century which evolved in the context of local history and culture, not a product of the May Fourth era alone. Revolutionary movements and traditions of the 1900s and the 1910s were very important precursors of the rise of the Chinese communist movement in the region. The leading figures of the communist movement in the region began their revolutionary trajectory and made their revolutionary commitment to save China in the early 1900s. Their connection to local society and participation in the major Republican revolutions and local political movements played an important role in the rise of the communist movement in the region. Examining local material, elite political and popular cultures of the period, this study tries not only to give a cultural explanation to the rise of Chinese communist revolution in the region, but also to transcend the revolution's abstract image of being formed from ideological and political organizations only and to reveal the human dimensions of the revolutionary process, the material and cultural world in which the local communists lived and to which they responded. It attempts to show that the rise of the Chinese communist revolution was also part of the orderly development of local history and culture and that informal structures of local culture also played an important role in the rise of Chinese communism.