The Communist Party of China’s local leadership, organizational form, and rural society in the 1920s, illustrated by Zeng Tianyu and the Jiangxi Wan’an rebellions

The Communist Party of China (CPC) transplanted the democratic centralism of the Soviet Union’s Communist (Bolshevik) Party as its own organizational system in its founding days. This system underwent difficult adjustments during the process of the Chinese revolution. After the meeting on 7 August 1927, the CPC started organizing rebellions in rural areas, which presented severe challenges to its organizational principles and capabilities. The particular circumstances of armed rebellion complicated the relationship between the local party members who organized the rebellion and the upper levels of the party, as well as the relationship between the local party leader and the party system. The Jiangxi Wan’an rebellion was one of the rebellions organized by the CPC after the 7 August meeting. Zeng Tianyu, head of the Wan’an rebellion, represents a certain type of local leader of the early CPC. Moreover, the conflicts in the CPC organizational system exposed in the organizing of the Wan’an rebellion were also typical during the period of the Agrarian Revolutionary War. Employing documents, data of organizations, memoirs, gazetteers, and journals in the fields of CPC history, social history, and the history of the Republic of China, this article investigates Zeng Tianyu’s life history and ethos, the background and process of the Wan’an rebellion, and the effort and failure of the upper level of the party in its attempts to strengthen the CPC organization in Wan’an. This article uncovers three kinds of tension in the organization of the early CPC: (1) tension between the officials’ authority and personal factors, (2) tension between the effectiveness of the organizational discipline and the autonomy of local leaders, and (3) tension between the organizing of the revolution and the traditional resources and local interests. These tensions can also explain a series of the CPC’s organizational events that happened during the same period.