Qu Qiubai

Qu Qiubai (born Jan. 29, 1899, Changzhou, Jiangsu province, China—died June 18, 1935, Changting, Fujian province) was a prominent leader and, on occasions in the 1920s and early 1930s, head of the Chinese Communist Party. In addition to being a political activist, he is considered one of the most important literary figures of 20th-century China. In the People’s Republic of China today, Qu, who was an early mentor of Mao Zedong, is honoured as one of the great martyrs of the communist revolution.

A well-known student radical, Qu was invited to participate in the first Marxist study groups organized by the eventual cofounder of the Chinese Communist Party, Li Dazhao, in 1920. The following year he went to the Soviet Union as a Moscow correspondent for the Beijing Chenbao (“Morning Post”). His dispatches describing Soviet life were published as Exiang jicheng (1921;“Journey to the Land of Hunger”). That book made a considerable impression on Chinese intellectuals, as did his second book, Chidu xinshi (1924; “Impressions of the Red Capital”).

In 1922 he officially joined the Chinese Communist Party. Later that year, when the head of the party, Chen Duxiu, visited Moscow, Qu served as his interpreter and returned with him to China, where he was elected to the party’s Central Committee. In 1927 he headed an intraparty opposition group criticizing Chen’s leadership, which was committed to the orthodox Marxist idea of organizing the urban proletariat. When Chen’s faction refused to print Mao’s work on the revolutionary potential of the Chinese peasantry, “Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan,” Qu wrote a preface to Mao’s essay and published it as a pamphlet.

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He by no means, however, completely sympathized with Mao’s ideas for a peasant revolution. Qu’s attitude became evident in August 1927, when he replaced Chen as head of the party and continued to insist that a communist victory could be achieved only through the capture of the cities. But that policy met with disaster when an attempted uprising at Guangzhou (Canton) by communist cadres was crushed by the Nationalists (Kuomintang) after three days. As a result, Qu was accused of “leftist deviationism” and recalled to Moscow. The scheme he devised while there for the romanization of the Chinese language was used widely.

In 1930 Qu returned to China, where he again became active in the party’s leadership. His policies, however, again came under attack, and he was removed from the party’s ruling Political Bureau. For a time he assumed the leadership of the League of Left-Wing Writers, which soon became one of the most influential organizations in mobilizing Chinese intellectuals to the support of the party. He also translated many works of important Russian authors previously unknown to the Chinese.

In 1934 Qu went to the southern province of Jiangxi, where a communist enclave had been established by Mao Zedong. When the main body of communist forces abandoned Jiangxi later that year under pressure from Nationalist forces, Mao was temporarily ousted from the party leadership, and Qu was forced to remain behind to carry on a propaganda campaign. Early in 1935 he was captured and subsequently executed. During his imprisonment Qu wrote his famous Duoyu de hua (“Superfluous Words”), in which he revealed the personal anguish he had undergone in submerging his needs for personal expression in order to aid the revolution.