Party Anniversary | July 1st, Party Founding Day

Release Date:

2022-07-01 08:00

After its founding in July 1921, the Communist Party of China was forced to operate in secrecy under the brutal rule of the reactionary forces, with no environment in which it could conduct open activities.

During the Great Revolution, the Party was preoccupied with the cooperation between the KMT and the CPC, the launch of workers’ and peasants’ movements, and support for the Northern Expedition, leaving it with no opportunity to commemorate the Party’s founding.

During the Land Revolution War, the Party was engaged in struggle under even more arduous rural combat conditions or under the reign of White Terror, and thus lacked the conditions to organize unified activities to commemorate the Party’s founding anniversary.

It was not until 1936, on the occasion of the fifteenth anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China, that Comrade Chen Tanqiu, a delegate to the Party’s First National Congress, published an article titled “Recollections of the First National Congress” in Volume 7 of the journal Communism International, published in Moscow, as a commemoration of the Party’s birth. This is the earliest known article commemorating the founding of the Communist Party of China.

The article states that the First National Congress of the Communist Party of China opened at the end of July 1921, but it does not provide a specific date. This commemorative article is based on the month in which the First Congress was held.

Rather than being based on a specific date for the grand opening, at that time no mass celebrations marking the Party’s birthday had yet been held.

At the time, only two of the Party’s founders who had attended the First National Congress were in Yan’an: Mao Zedong and Dong Biwu. They recalled that the Congress was held in July, but could not recall the exact date.

Due to the lack of archival records, it was temporarily impossible to verify the exact date, so July 1 was designated as the anniversary of the Party’s founding.