Chen Duxiu

Chen Duxiu (born October 9, 1879, Huaining county [now Anqing], Anhui province, China—died May 27, 1942, Jiangjing, near Chongqing) was a founder of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP; 1921) and a major leader in developing the cultural basis of revolution in China. He was removed from his position of leadership in 1927 and was expelled from the Communist Party in 1929.

Education and early career

Chen was born to a wealthy family. His father, who had passed the first degree in the civil service examination and served as an official in the military office in Manchuria, died when Chen was two years old. Chen, who was the youngest of four children, was brought up by his mother and educated in the Chinese Classics and traditional literature in turn by his grandfather, several private tutors, and, finally, his brother. In 1896 Chen passed the first civil service examination summa cum laude in Huaining and the next year passed the second in Nanjing. His experience in the examinations, however, convinced him of the irrelevance of the traditional educational and governmental systems in the 20th century and prompted him to become a social and political reformer. Consequently, he entered the renowned Qiushi (“Truth-Seeking”) Academy in Hangzhou, where he studied French, English, and naval architecture.

In 1902, at the age of 23, Chen, after delivering speeches against the Qing (Manchu) regime in the capital of his home province, fled to Nanjing. He went to Japan the same year for study, enrolling at the Tokyo Higher Normal School. Upon his return to China in 1903, he assisted friends in establishing the subversive Guomin Riribao (“National Daily News”) in Shanghai, which was quickly suppressed by the authorities. He then went back to Anhui in 1904, where he established a periodical to promote the use of the vernacular in writing. In 1906 Chen again went to Japan and studied at Waseda University in Tokyo but returned to Anhui in the same year to teach at a high school and establish another vernacular periodical in Wuhu. During his stay in Japan, Chen refused to join the revolutionary party led by Sun Yat-sen, because he did not wish to accept nationalism, which was one of its tenets. According to some reports, in the following year Chen went to study in France and became an enthusiastic admirer of French culture.

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Upon his return to China in 1908, he visited Manchuria for a short time before teaching at the Army Elementary School in Hangzhou. After the overthrow of the Manchu monarchy and the establishment of the republic, Chen became secretary general to the military governor of Anhui province in 1912 and, concurrently, dean of the provincial higher normal school. After taking part in the unsuccessful second revolution against Pres. Yuan Shikai in 1913, he fled to Shanghai and, the next year, to Japan, where he helped to edit Jiayin (“The Tiger”), a liberal Chinese magazine calling for political reforms.

Role in the intellectual revolution

The period of Chen’s greatest influence on Chinese thought and politics began on his return to China in 1915, when he established the monthly Qingnian (“Youth Magazine”) in Shanghai, later renamed Xinqingnian (“New Youth”). In its pages he proposed that the youth of China undertake a vast intellectual, literary, and cultural revolution to rejuvenate the nation. Many of the young writers who contributed to the monthly—among them Hu Shih, a liberal promoter of the vernacular literature, Lu Xun, a leading short-story writer and essayist, Li Dazhao, Chen’s chief collaborator in the Chinese Communist Party, and Mao Zedong—were later to become important intellectual and political leaders.

Between 1916 and 1927, in the absence of a strong central power, numerous warlords arose in most parts of the country, and their armed quarrels all but rent China. Chen’s revolutionary mission thus assumed even greater importance; when, in 1917, he was appointed dean of the School of Letters at Peking University, he took care to gather around him many liberal and progressive professors and students. With their help, he established the short-lived radical Meizhou Pinglun (“Weekly Critic”) in December 1918. Their “new thought” and “new literature” dominated the May Fourth Movement, named after the date of the massive student protests in 1919 against the Chinese government’s weak policy toward Japan and the Shandong resolution of the Paris Peace Conference, which was going to transfer German rights in China to the Japanese. Because of his prominent role in the movement, however, Chen was forced to resign his post and was imprisoned for three months, from June to September 1919.

Foundation of the Chinese Communist Party

The Russian Revolution of 1917 impressed Chen as a way of modernizing an underdeveloped country, and shortly after his release he was converted to Marxism in Shanghai. There, in May 1920, with a handful of followers, Chen founded a communist group and prepared to establish the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). In July 1921 the first representative conference of the CCP was held, and Chen was elected as secretary general. (The founding date of the CCP was officially set later as July 1921 by the party leadership.) He remained in that post as the party’s undisputed leader for seven years, often regarded as “China’s Lenin.” In December 1920, in an effort to promote his communist views, Chen accepted the invitation of the rebel military governor of Guangdong province to become head of the education board of the provincial government in Guangzhou (Canton). In the fall of 1922, Chen established the influential Xiangdao Zhoubao (“Guide Weekly”) as a successor to the “New Youth,” which he had converted into a communist organ two years earlier.

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After his attendance at the Fourth Congress of the Comintern (the international organization of communist parties) in Moscow in November–December 1922, Chen reluctantly carried out the order of the Comintern to head his party’s collaboration with the Nationalist Party (Kuomintang), founded by Sun Yat-sen; he was elected to that party’s Central Committee in January 1924. A year later, when the Nationalists’ right wing launched its attack on the communists, Chen repeatedly proposed to withdraw en masse from the Nationalist Party but was overruled by the Comintern. After the collaboration collapsed in 1927, the Comintern blamed Chen for the failure of the alliance with the Nationalists and had him removed from his position of leadership. In November 1929 he was expelled from the party. For several years, with the support of the Chinese Trotskyists and other communist dissenters, he tried to regain influence in the party but failed.

On October 13, 1932, Chen was arrested by the foreign administration of Shanghai, where he had been residing since 1927. Extradited to Nanjing, he was tried and in 1933 sentenced to 15 years in prison by the Nationalist government. After the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War, he was released on parole in August 1937. Chen moved from place to place until the end of July 1938, when he arrived in the wartime capital, Chongqing, where he taught for a while in a junior high school. In poor health and with few friends, he retired to Jiangjing, a small town west of Chongqing, where he died.

A fearless protester, Chen rejected China’s traditional values and saw Marxism as a means to achieve a “mass democracy” with the broad laboring masses as its base. He recognized, however, the significant role played by the bourgeoisie in the Chinese revolution that he hoped to achieve. During the last years of his life, Chen, still a socialist, denounced Joseph Stalin’s dictatorship and defended such democratic institutions as an independent nonpartisan judiciary, opposition parties, the free press, and free elections.