How Inevitable Was the Rise of the Chinese Communist Party?
It is the most powerful political party in the world, controlling China’s future as well as its past, but was the young CCP in control of its imperial destiny?
‘They were simply more ruthless than their opponents’
Frank Dikötter is Author of Red Dawn Over China: How Communism Conquered a Quarter of Humanity (Bloomsbury, 2026)
The Communists never had much popular appeal in China, and their victory in 1949 can be ascribed to help from Moscow and a hand from Washington.
In July 1921 it took a Dutch Comintern envoy called Henk Sneevliet to herd a dozen people into a room in Shanghai to establish the CCP. The party did not thrive, even after Stalin convinced the Chinese Nationalist Party that they should accept CCP members into their ranks in exchange for money and munitions.
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