Publisher's Synopsis
The May Fourth Movement, which began in 1919, was a time of nationalist and revolutionary activism and intellectual ferment in China which can be likened to the 1960s in the United States. Anarchism was the predominant revolutionary ideology; Marxism was virtually unknown. Yet by 1921 the Communist Party of China had emerged as the unchallenged leader of the Left. This book offers a new explanation of this development using documents previously unavailable in China but released since the death of Mao. It argues that left to their own devices Chinese revolutionaries would have naturally gravitated towards non-Marxist ideologies, but that when Communist thought and organization was introduced to radical circles by the Comintern it found extraordinarily fertile ground.
