May Fourth, Li Dazhao, and a 1920 draft in Shanghai

Inspired by May Fourth and by a wider current of ideas, Chinese students and activists, the notes write, began to study Western political thought in earnest. The Soviets’ abandonment of unequal treaties, among a few other changes, made left-wing ideas more attractive in China. Li Dazhao, whom they call the Marxist father of China, was stirred by the 1917 Bolshevik revolution and, they write, became the first in China to take a serious interest in Marxism.

The Comintern, founded in 1919 to spread communism, decided to create a party in China, in part, they say, to secure influence across the continent. Agents sent from Moscow to look at the situation concluded that the group around Li at Peking University was likely to take part and might form a party core. In 1920 a communist group in Shanghai drafted what they call the Chinese Communist Party. China, they add, was then caught in backwardness and warlordism; even the Comintern’s period of sounding-out, in that setting, looked like good fortune.

A long rivalry, and a war that begins without a declaration

The conflict with Japan, they write, had been forming for a long time, as Japan moved from ambition on the continent toward an expanding empire. The Depression, they say, lit those ambitions further. American and European protectionism, as they tell it, bore on Japan’s export economy and on a belief that Japan had a special mission and exclusive rights in China. The weakening of central authority and the rise of warlords, they add, opened space for a military empire to grow. In China, public debate over how to deal with Japan was lively.

The second United Front and Soviet support, the notes go on, convinced Japan that a full-scale war could not be avoided. On 7 July 1937 a small clash between Japanese and Chinese troops at Lugouqiao, near Beijing, widened into open hostility: a war in Asia, they write, that began without a declaration. The Japanese government tried to settle the incident locally; Chinese public opinion, they say, demanded firm resistance.

Chiang’s line, Shanghai, Black Saturday, and Nanjing in December

On 17 July, the notes record, Chiang Kai-shek declared that to lose even an inch of territory would make him an eternal sinner to the Chinese nation. From late July, fighting began in the north; Japan occupied Beijing and pushed toward Tianjin, and Chinese forces could not hold the region. On 13 August the two armies also clashed in the south over Shanghai. The first local cause, they write, is not clear, but three months of fierce fighting followed. Chiang placed more than 500,000 troops in the city’s defence; Chinese forces took heavy losses of men, elite units, and equipment, and civilian harm was great. On 14 August, “Black Saturday,” hundreds of civilians died. The battle showed the Nationalists’ resolve, the notes write, but it ended in defeat before Japan’s overwhelming force. Japan occupied major cities, including Beijing and Shanghai. In December 1937 Nanjing fell, and the notes record the Nanjing Massacre: merciless violence, they write, carried out by the Japanese army.

A short outline in the same notes also points back to commercial growth in the Qing economy and, around 1911, to pressure toward a republic associated with Sun Yat-sen — only as that outline states them, before the war and the party’s rise that the later chapters tell.

The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. The notes, a student summary of parts 1 and 2 of Klaus Mühlhahn’s The Birth of Modern China: Li Dazhao and a 1920 Shanghai draft, Lugouqiao, Chiang’s 17 July line, Black Saturday, and the fall of Nanjing in December 1937.

Last updated: 15 November 2026