My old friend, Professor David Apter, many times encouraged me to publish the introduction to my source book on the Sneevliet Archives as self-standing work. It is a strange feeling to revisit this important topic some 30 years later. I was busy with other projects but with the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) taking place in July 2021, it seemed a good time to revisit how it all began. A further spur to revisiting the question of the CCP’s early years is the release and publication of the treasure trove of documents held at the Russian Center for the Conservation and Study of Modern History Documents, the former party archives in Moscow. It is unlikely that another such trove of documents will be released to help us tell the story of the party’s establishment and its early years. These original materials help refine our earlier answers to questions such as the degree to which the Soviets guided the party’s establishment, the role that Moscow and its agents played in directing policy and encouraging, or forcing, the CCP to cooperate with the Guomindang (GMD). The documents permit a finer analysis of divisions within the Soviet apparatus about the nature and value of the collaboration, the development of the labor movement and whether it was feasible to create a mass communist party. This volume relies on these documents and those of the Sneevliet Archive, held at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. These latter materials are published in the original language with an annotated translation in two volumes (Saich, 1991). The archives are now open for scholars to consult. When Sneevliet’s personal papers were donated to the Institute, they arrived with the obligation that a source publication be published before they could be made available to other researchers. The history of getting them to publication is probably worth a book in itself.
The publication of the Sneevliet materials and those from Moscow have renewed debate about the party’s founding and the origins of what later came to be known as the first united front in China. I have included the most important of these secondary analyses into the new book but have relied on contemporary documents wherever possible not only for specific details but also for informing the analysis. These contemporary documents are complemented by newspaper articles by individuals and materials published, or written, by the CCP or the GMD. Of the secondary materials, the work of Ishikawa (2013) stands out as an extraordinary feat of detection.
The Russian-held materials are published in three languages: Russian, German and Chinese (see the bibliography for details). For the purposes of this volume, I have used the German and Chinese publications. When citing the works, I refer to the document number alone if it is from volume one (1920–1925) and if it is from the period 1925–1927, it is listed with volume two and the document number. This allows the reader to check the usage against the German or Chinese versions and the Russian publication of the materials.
The materials from the Sneevliet Archive are listed by their number in the Archive and can be found in Saich, 1991, as can the cited materials from the van Ravesteyn Archive and those reports that were sent to the Governor-General of the Dutch Indies.