A Place in Time

Five would become traitors to the Communist cause. Seven would die before the founding of the People's Republic in 1949—some of them, historians suspect, killed by the Communists themselves. Only three would make it into the upper echelons of the Party, and of those one would die prematurely after a campaign to erase class lines unleashed a decade-long reign of terror. When the 13 young delegates of China's fledgling Communist Party, including a forceful activist named Mao Zedong and a cerebral philosopher called Li Da, met in a cramped lane house in Shanghai on July 23, 1921, they had nothing less...