The Chinese Communist Party: Made (partly) in Japan
One underappreciated aspect of the Chinese Communist Party's history, particularly its early history, is how much of it was influenced by Japan.
![Chinese Communist Party's Japan origins](https://thechinaproject.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/ccp.jpg)
For decades now, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has celebrated its founding on July 1, primarily because the precise dates and locations and attendees at the actual founding meetings, in July 1921, arenโt entirely settled. But they did occur, first in whatโs now the Xintiandi district of Shanghai and then, as the attendees feared discovery by spies or the police, on a boat on a lake in neighboring Zhejiang province.
There is one aspect of the founding and development of the Party that isnโt in doubt, though itโs rather less known. In Chinaโs War with Japan, published in 2013, renowned China scholar and Oxford professor Rana Mitter reminds us that, โFor good or ill, a large proportion of the history of twentieth-century China was made in Japan.โ And while the Partyโs official history says, โAfter the October Socialist Revolution in Soviet Union led by Lenin was victorious in 1917, Marxism spread to China,โ that antedates the exposure of thousands of Chinese intellectuals to Marxism, and their importation of it into China, mostly via Japan, by at least a decade.
Mitter could easily revise his claim to be about the history of the Party itself. Most of the CCPโs founders โ the education they boasted and the very language they used in establishing and developing the CCP โ were influenced by Japan.
Go east, young men (and women)
Between 1895 and 1905, Japan shocked the world โ twice. Chinaโs distress at losing the First Sino-Japanese War (1894 โ 1895), to a polity that had long been little more than a vassal state, was profound, but Japanโs victory in the Russo-Japanese War (1904 โ 1905) was a tectonic shock to the entire world: never before had an Asian state stood up to a European power and remained standing. Japan therefore became a paradigm for a modernizing Asian power, and Chinese intellectuals, witnessing the drawn-out demise of the Qing dynasty (many were eager to hasten the demise) and the consequent prostration of the country in the face of Western aggression, were increasingly eager to learn from a country that had not only modernized, but resolutely thwarted imperial Russiaโs East Asian ambitions.
And Japan was just a few daysโ boat-ride to the east. The result was what the late Harvard scholar Ezra Vogel, in his final opus, 2020โs China and Japan, called โthe first large-scale study abroad program anywhere in the world.โ Nearly 30,000 Chinese had studied in Japan (link in Chinese) by the advent of the First World War, and half again that amount would do so in the following two decades.
They learned more than modernizing techniques and tactics. One of the leading Chinese intellectuals of the era, Liรกng Qวchฤo ๆขๅฏ่ถ , spent years in Japan, first in exile after the failed Hundred Days Reform of 1898. Had he not escaped from China, he would have been executed. Years later, at Tokyoโs famous Ueno Station, Liang saw families sending sons off to the war with Russia. He noted in particular a large banner displaying โGrant Death in Battle,โ and wrote, โOn seeing this, I was astonished and respectful and unable to put it out of my mind.โ In Japan and China โ From War to Peace, 1894 โ 1972, whence this English translation of Liangโs words, scholar Marius Jansen asserts that โthe student movement [in Japan] thus served as a breeding ground for Chinese nationalism.โ
Of the 13 men who attended the inaugural CCP meetings in July 1921, four had lengthy study periods in Japan, as did the two acknowledged founders of the Party, Chรฉn Dรบxiรน ้็ฌ็ง and Lว Dร zhฤo ๆๅคง้. Neither Chen nor Li attended the July meetings (they sent proxies), but both were well known, as was Liang, for introducing words and concepts from the West to Chinese readers via the Japanese translations theyโd immersed themselves in.
One of the attendees, Yรกng Chฤngjรฌ ๆจๆๆต, served as Mรกo Zรฉdลngโs ๆฏๆณฝไธ teacher at Hunan First Normal University after Yangโs own years in Japan, becoming a primary inspiration for the young Maoโs high regard for the island nation to the east. In From the Ruins of Empire, Pankaj Mishra states that Mao โlearnt about the full scale of Chinaโs degradation at the hands of the West from a teacher who had studied in Japan.โ
Yang also introduced Mao to the seminal New Youth (ๆฐ้ๅนด xฤซn qฤซngniรกn), a publication launched by Chen Duxiu (and based substantially on Chenโs learnings from Japan and Japanese); Li Dazhao, a Peking University librarian at the time, to whom Mao would become an assistant; and Yangโs daughter, Yรกng Kฤihuรฌ ๆจๅผๆ ง, who would become Maoโs second wife. For a biographical article about Yang in the journal Modern China in 2006, Georgetown College professor Liyan Liu chose an entirely justified title: โThe Man Who Molded Mao: Yang Changji and the First Generation of Chinese Communists.โ
Lว Xรนn ้ฒ่ฟ and Guล Mรฒruรฒ ้ญๆฒซ่ฅ, two other leading literary figures of the age who also had studied in Japan for years, joined Chen and Li and Liang in using Japanese neologisms in their Chinese writing. Lu Xun was among the more eager to jettison Confucianism (and even the Chinese script). He exhorted his countryfolk โto never read Chinese books, to emulate Western modernity through Japanโฆโ
In perhaps his most famous work, 1898โs Exhortation to Study (ๅๅญฆ็ฏ quร n xuรฉ piฤn) top Qing official Zhฤng Zhฤซdรฒng ๅผ ไนๆด wrote, โJapan is nearby and inexpensive for travel so that many can go; it is close to China and students will not forget their country. Japanese writing is similar to Chinese and it can be translated easily, and Western learning is extremely varied and the Japanese have already selected its essentialsโ (translation from Jansen). Zhang therefore suggested that learning about the world through Japanese produced twice the result with half the effort.
Round-trip words
Given these historical phenomena, itโs no surprise that a tsunami of Japanese neologisms entered Chinese from the late-19th century. The leading intellectuals mentioned above, and thousands of others, leveraged not only what they learned from Japan, but Japanese vocabulary and phrases, to help communicate what they considered existentially important for Chinaโs progress.
A Chinese counselor at the embassy in Tokyo, Huรกng Zลซnxiร n ้ป้ตๅฎช, published a quite popular collection of poems in the late 1870s, Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects from Japan (ๆฅๆฌๆไบ่ฏ rรฌbฤn zรกshรฌ shฤซ), which introduced many Japanese neologisms to Chinese readers. Among the long list: yรฌyuร n ่ฎฎ้ข (giโin in Japanese), literally โdiscussion hallโ but meaning โparliamentโ; and zhรจngdวng ๆฟๅ (seitล in Japanese), meaning โpolitical party.โ Japanโs first political parties appeared at about that time, followed 10 years later by the creation of the Diet, Japanโs parliament. China was still a few decades away from either.
In Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects from Japan, Huang also gains credit as being the first Chinese to use wรฉnmรญng ๆๆ as a term for โcivilization,โ borrowing from Fukuzawa Yukichiโs Outline of a Theory of Civilization (Bunmeiron no Gairyaku), published in 1875. Zhangโs Exhortation to Study also owes a profound debt to Fukuzawa (link in Japanese), often referred to as Japanโs Benjamin Franklin, whose 17-volume On Learning (Gakumon no Susume) was published 25 years previously. On Learning had an enormous effect on Japanโs modernization in the late-19th century, and Fukuzawa in turn had an enormous effect on modernization not only in Japan, but throughout the region. (And, lending credence to the maxim that thereโs nothing new under the sun, On Learning relied substantially on a work entitled Elements of Moral Science, published by Brown University President Francis Weyland in the 1830s.)
The importation was vastly easier than importation from other languages, because Chinese and Japanese share a written script: hร nzรฌ ๆฑๅญ (kanji in Japanese). Japan had no written language before importing Chinese characters starting around 1,600 years ago, and since then the foundation of written Japanese has been kanji. And because the characters are logograms, carrying image-meaning independent of sound, their power for cross-language communication has been and remains tremendous.
Early attempts to translate directly from, say, English, trying to use the Chinese hanzi as phonetic representations of the foreign words, rapidly created a lexicographic logjam. โUniversityโ was early on rendered phonetically as yรณu nรญ wรจi shรฌ de ็ฑๅฐผๅซๅฃซๅฐ, an unwieldy and confusing jumble, with characters bearing no resemblance to the actual meaning of the word. But the vastly simpler dร xuรฉ ๅคงๅญฆ, a combination already existing in Chinese, โreturnedโ to China from the Japanese with a different, intuitive meaning. Pronounced daigaku in Japanese, daxue is an example of what scholar Victor Mair and others refer to as โround-trip words.โ The characters for daxue are readily intelligible for Chinese readers, as they translate literally into English as โbig learning.โ No surprise then that middle school is rendered zhลngxuรฉ ไธญๅญฆ, literally โmiddle learning,โ while xiวoxuรฉ ๅฐๅญฆ became elementary school, literally โsmall learning.โ
Dรฉ mรณ kรจ lฤ xฤซ ๅพท่ฐๅ ๆ่ฅฟ was an early, kludgy Chinese phonetic attempt at โdemocracy,โ which rapidly lost out to the vastly simpler and intuitive Japanese term ๆฐไธป, minshu in that language, pronounced mรญnzhว in Chinese and literally meaning โpeople as primary.โ And โdiabetesโ would have been trouble to import phonetically, but Meiji-era Japanese had concocted a much simpler and also highly intuitive option, ็ณๅฐฟ็ , tลnyลbyo, or tรกngniร obรฌng in Chinese, which literally translates as โsugar urine sickness.โ The hanzi/kanji term for diabetes is arguably better than the European language โoriginals,โ because the meaning is immediately visually available to the reader of either Japanese or Chinese (or Korean for that matter, but thatโs a digression).
Many of the imported Japanese terms were not substitutes for existing Chinese terms, but new words entirely, and relatively new concepts as well. Specifically, some of the concepts that Chinese students were learning in Japan, and therefore the vocabulary for those concepts, were Marxist. Two other words to appear in Japan in the 1870s, later to be transported across the East China Sea to the mainland, were ๅ ฑไบงไธปไน (gรฒngchวn zhวyรฌ / kyลsan shugi), or โcommunism,โ and ็คพไผไธปไน (shรจhuรฌ zhวyรฌ / shakai shugi), or โsocialism.โ The Japanese and, eventually, Chinese for โsocialismโ has a literal meaning quite close to the English and other European forms: shugi is a suffix meaning โ-ism,โ while shakai means โsociety.โ The joint term for โcommunismโ is a bit more poetic, as the first two characters mean โpublic assets,โ a compressed version of Marxismโs โcommon ownership of the means of production.โ
Reverse flow
The linguistic effect on Chinese was profound. In China and Japan, Jansen writes,
In the long run the cultural importance of the migration to Japan was probably greater even than its short-term political significance. [โฆ] The student movement meant a great surge of translation from Japanese. [โฆ]
This flood of translation from Japanese affected Chinese vocabulary. There was a massive infusion, amounting to three fourths of the new vocabulary of those decades, of new terminology into Chinese in the form of Chinese character equivalence the Japanese had first worked out for themselves.โ
Publishing in the Journal of Chinese Linguistics in 2006, Professor Zhร o Jiฤn ่ตตๅ expands:
More significantly, the Japanese practice of creating new words to accommodate new knowledge influenced native linguistic practice, hastening the formation of modern Chinese. [โฆ] Scholars such as Lรฉi Yรญ ้ท้ข and Wรกng Bฤซnbฤซn
็ๅฝฌๅฝฌ have even claimed that 70 percent of the most frequently-used words in modern Chinese originate in Japanese. [โฆ]
From this point of view, we may say that the flow back of Japanese loanwords into modern Chinese was the first significant requital of linguistic favors China received since Japan borrowed the Chinese writing system in the mid-4th century.
The concurrent effect specifically on the CCPโs foundation and organization should by now be obvious as well. The very name of the party, ไธญๅฝๅ ฑไบงๅ zhลngguรณ gรฒngchวndวng, contains the Japanese import โcommunist partyโ (kyลsantล in Japanese).
Japanese languageโs influence on Chinaโs political lexicon continued even during the years of war with Japan, which started in either 1931 or 1937, depending on which authority one inclines toward, and ended in 1945. During those years, Japanese imports to China included โcadreโ (ๅนฒ้จ gร nbรน), โorganโ (ๆบๅ ณ jฤซguฤn), โtrade unionโ (ๅณๅจ็ปๅ lรกodรฒng zวhรฉ), and the ominous euphemism โliquidationโ (ๆธ ็ฎ qฤซngsuร n).
Unusually for a famous mainland author, Guo Morou survived the Nationalist era, the years of war with Japan, the final years of the civil war, to 1949, and also the Mao years. Guo (who fancied himself as Chinaโs Goethe but is more like a Chinese version of one of Goetheโs most famous characters, Faust) asserted in the 1950s that, โWe studied Western culture through JapanโฆAt the same time that the study of Japan broke the feudalistic conventions of the past, it served to further China’s progress toward modernity.โ
Gou could have plausibly replaced โWestern cultureโ with โcommunism.โ He and a host of others relied on their Japanese learning, and the Japanese lexicon itself, for much of the architecture of the Chinese Communist Party.