Guerrilla Bureaucrats: Archives and Political Communication in the Early Chinese Communist Party, 1921–45

The Chinese Communist Party, nearly decimated after the White Terror in 1927, was fragmented—geographically, ideologically, politically. Yet despite—or rather because of—these deep divisions, its paper trail grew. The party relied on paperwork to project power, to gather and communicate actionable information, and to monitor its subordinates scattered across the country. But as much as archives were essential to its organizational power and institutional memory, bureaucratic writing also presented a deep dilemma to the CCP: not only did paper trails create security risks, they could also alienate the party from the mass line and generated tension between campaign and bureaucratic modes of governance.

Drawing on party archives, memoirs, and published documents, this paper examines the party’s culture of documentation in the 1920s and 1930s. I show that while the Chinese communists learned from the Soviets early on, it did not fully replicate the Bolshevik model. As the CCP moved from mobilizing the urban working class to the Chinese countryside, it confronted new operational realities: cadres were illiterate, communication of documents precarious, and compliance with centralized commands by no means certain. Bureaucratic writing had to be re-invented; in the reverse direction, it also changed the CCP and created a malleable structure of power that uneasily combined elements of campaign-style mass mobilization and Leninist bureaucratization. While many insurgent groups existed before and since the CCP, few succeeded in building an enduring party and state structure. The CCP, which graduated from guerrilla warfare to become the world’s largest (and one of its) political parties, is thus a remarkable case study, one that will shed light on the centrality of information control in party organization and its key role in maintaining the CCP’s continued rule in China today.