The Third National Congress took place from June 12 to June 20, 1923. The address — 31 Xuguyuan Road in Guangzhou — was neither grand nor conspicuous. Guangzhou had become a haven for revolutionary politics under Sun Yat-sen's government, which made it the logical venue for a gathering that could not have happened safely in Shanghai or Beijing.

Chen Duxiu, the party's leading intellectual and organizational force, chaired the congress. Alongside him sat Li Dazhao, Cai Hesen, Zhang Guotao, Tan Pingshan, and Henk Sneevliet — a Dutch Communist representing the Comintern, the Moscow-based international body that had become the CCP's primary external sponsor. Sneevliet arrived with a specific mandate: to push the young party toward formal cooperation with Sun Yat-sen's Kuomintang.

The central debate of the congress was whether CCP members should be permitted — or required — to join the Kuomintang while maintaining their Communist Party membership. The Comintern, looking at the relative weakness of the CCP's 420 members against the much larger and better-resourced Nationalist movement, believed that an alliance with the Kuomintang offered the best chance of achieving the immediate goal: unifying China and ending the era of warlord rule.

Chen Duxiu presented the case. Mao Zedong spoke about the possibilities of the workers' movement in Hunan. After debate, the congress passed the National Movement and Kuomintang Question Act. CCP members would be permitted to join the Kuomintang as individuals while the party maintained its separate structure and continued recruiting. It was a pragmatic calculation with enormous consequences.

One of the congress's less-remembered but significant acts was the passage of a resolution on the women's movement, drafted by Xiang Jingyu. The resolution argued that the fight against warlords and foreign imperialism could unite women across different political tendencies — from labor organizers to suffragists to those working to abolish prostitution — under a shared anti-feudal banner. Xiang Jingyu, who had co-founded the CCP's women's department and would be executed by the Nationalist government in 1928, understood that the revolution's reach would determine its meaning. The resolution was a marker of how seriously the early party took the question of who the revolution was actually for.

When the nine days concluded, the delegates sang The Internationale at the Martyr's Tomb in Huanghuagang Park. The new Central Committee comprised five members: Chen Duxiu as President and Mao Zedong as Secretary, alongside Luo Zhanglong, Cai Hesen, and Tan Pingshan. Several of them — including Mao and Chen — remained in Guangzhou after the congress ended.

The decision to cooperate with the Kuomintang bore fruit quickly. Sun Yat-sen reformed his party along the lines the CCP had been pushing for, and the following year, in 1924, the First National Congress of the Kuomintang formally established the alliance. For a brief period, the two parties shared a common project. That alliance would later fracture violently — but in June 1923, on Xuguyuan Road, the delegates who voted for cooperation could not have known what was coming. They voted for what seemed possible.