The Communist Manifesto 1848) in Ghent to establish a branch of the Democratic Association there. Subsequently, having not heard from Marx for nearly two months, the Central Committee of the Communist League sent him an ultimatum on 24 or 26 January, demanding he submit the completed manuscript by 1 February. This imposition spurred Marx on, who struggled to work without a deadline, and he seems to have rushed to finish the job in time. (For evidence of this, historian Eric Hobsbawm points to the absence of rough drafts, only one page of which survives.) In all, the "Manifesto" was written over 6–7 weeks.
The Christian Manifesto signatories can be interpreted in two ways: a relatively high number of signatories testifies to the success of Wu and the campaign to accommodate to the communist government. Conversely, the number of people who did not sign the manifesto count as people who did not want the Chinese church to sever its links with foreigners. It was feared that the NCC, which had facilitated cooperation between Chinese Protestants and foreign missionaries since 1922, would lose its independence. Most appear to have signed the document out of patriotic sentiments, not because of fundamental agreement with the actual provisions of the manifesto: