Note on Texts and Sources
The text in this edition is adapted from the 1970 Hammersmith reprint of the 1922 English edition of the Congress minutes printed in Petrograd. I used the Russian and Chinese versions of the minutes held in the Comintern archive to correct mistakes in translation and resolve ambiguities. Information on the speakers, delegates and the organisations that sent them to the Congress is mainly taken from the Comintern archive, but also from other published sources, including the German language version of the minutes.
A major problem with the source text was the distortion of Asian proper names. The minute takers seem to have used no particular transliteration standard. Where, as in most cases, I have been able to identify the person, organisation or place referred to, I have inserted modern transliterations and put the original form in a footnote. For some well-known names I have stuck with older, commonly used forms – so I use Syngman Rhee not Yi Sŭng-man, Chiang Kai-shek rather than Jiang Jieshi, Sun Yat-sen rather than Sun Yixian or Sun Zhongshan. I have used the more familiar term Kuomintang rather than Guomindang to refer to the Chinese Nationalists, and Ming Pao rather than Ming Bao to refer to their newspaper. The city of Guangzhou is usually referred to as Canton in the literature of the period, including in the Congress minutes, and I have followed this usage.
Another problem was the Comintern practice of using pseudonyms which made it difficult to identify the speakers. Where I have been able to identify the people referred to, I have put their real names in brackets beside their pseudonyms (except where they are better known by their pseudonyms as in the case of Zinoviev). I have included a list of delegates to the congress as an appendix, along with short biographies where I could find material. For the most part, I identified delegates from the conference mandates and the questionnaires they filled in. But some mandates are missing from the archive, in particular several from the Japanese delegation, so I included some names from secondary sources. An odd result of this is that for the Chinese and Japanese delegations I have listed one more delegate than the number counted by the credentials committee. Another outstanding anomaly is that I have so far been unable to identify one of the main Korean speakers who is referred to as Wong-Kieng in the English minutes, Pak Chen in the Russian minutes, Piao Ren in Chinese, and Pak Tachen in a German language list of speakers.
I have corrected straightforward spelling mistakes and obvious printing errors – for example, religious sects was written as religious seels – without marking them. Where I have made small changes to the wording to clarify the meaning, I have indicated this with square brackets.