A tale of love and murder helped determine true date of party’s founding. Hint: it’s not July 1

The Chinese Communist Party is jumping the gun with its nationwide birthday party Thursday, celebrating its founding weeks ahead of schedule.

Years ago, an army general with the instincts of a detective determined the true date of the party’s creation: July 23, 1921. It was a tale of hopeless love and murder that led him to the discovery.

Two agents sent by Moscow to organise a Communist Party in China met with 13 Chinese revolutionaries in a prosperous house in Shanghai in July that year. They met off and on for eight days before the local police, curious about what the two agents were doing, raided the building.

No one was detained. But the revolutionaries quickly burned their papers, destroying evidence of when they had met.

An unexpected coincidence then occurred July 31, 1921: a predawn shooting death at the nearby Dadong Hotel. The police searched the neighbourhood for the killer. The Communists hastily decamped to a boat on a lake southwest of the city, and finished their congress there.

Mao attended the original meeting in Shanghai. He cited the first congress in a series of speeches in late May and early June of 1938. These were motivational speeches he gave to rally Communists against the Japanese occupation of east-central and northeastern China.

But lacking records of when in July the first meeting had been held, Mao simply asserted in his speeches that the anniversary was coming up on July 1. Ever since, the Chinese Communist Party has celebrated that date.

After Mao’s death in 1976, a decorated People’s Liberation Army general named Shao Weizheng set about trying to determine the real date of the party’s founding.

Two participants in the first national congress, Chen Gongbo and Zhou Fohai, had left personal papers that mentioned the predawn shooting at the Dadong Hotel and the subsequent search for the killer.

Shao found three contemporaneous newspaper accounts of a predawn quarrel between lovers at the Dadong Hotel on July 31, 1921. A man named Qu Songlin, an assistant to a British doctor, had borrowed the doctor’s gun and shot and killed his 22-year-old girlfriend, Kong Aqin. Kong was married to another man. News accounts said they planned a double suicide. Though Qu had written five suicide notes to friends, family and a local newspaper, he fled after killing Kong rather than turn the gun on himself.

Shanghai this summer opened a huge, mostly underground museum at the site of the first congress. The museum mentions that the true date was July 23, 1921, but does not describe how Shao discovered the date and published his research in 1980 in an official Communist Party history.

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