上海法租界
The party was officially formed on 15 April 1928. Its planning went back to as early as 1925, when Moscow-trained Taiwanese students began to contact likeminded individuals in China and Japan. By late 1927, the Comintern had instructed Japanese communists, who had been organized since 1922, to draft political and organizational charters () for a "Japanese Communist Party, Taiwanese National Branch". Following the draft, and Hsieh Hsueh-hung secretly met in Shanghai with seven others, three of whom represented the Chinese, Korean, and Japanese Communist Parties, respectively, to form the nascent organization. The TCP's first headquarters were located in the Shanghai French Concession.