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Command on a piece of cloth/ Election for Record of the Year 2016

How the Chinese Communist Party moved to Canton by means of a Dutchman. 

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On July 18, 1922 the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) only existed for one year. The Communists in Moscow wanted the CCP to leave Shanghai and move to Canton so they could work together with the nationalists concentrated in the South. The Russians thought that would help communism grow big in China.

Moscow send envoy PHILIPP to China, a pseudonym of the Dutch international revolutionary Henk Sneevliet. One year earlier he helped to found the CCP and for Mao Zedong to emerge as CCP leader.

Sneevliet sewed the command typed on a piece of cloth into his clothes. then travelled from Moscow through Siberia to Shanghai. The text on the cloth told the CCP to move from Shanghai to Canton.

After an internal discussion Sneevliet managed to convince the Chinese Communists and they actually moved their headquarters. Only to move back to Shanghai one year later.

Because of his large contributions in the early years of the CCP, Henk Sneevliet even now is a well-known and respected historical figure in China. In the Museum of the First National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in Shanghai there is an oval table with wax figures of the CCP-founders sitting around it. Henk Sneevliet is one of them.

In 2009 the museum organized an exhibition about the life of Sneevliet, which came about with the cooperation of Sneevliet expert Emile Schwidder of the IISH. Next September the Museum of the Peasant Movement in Guangzhou (formerly Canton) will do the same.

The Henk Sneevliet archive is stored at the IISH in Amsterdam. The Command on a Piece of Cloth is part of that archive.

Please vote for this historical archive record

as Record of the Year in the current 2016 annual contest we Dutch call Stuk van het Jaar.

Posted: 
1 October 2016