Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao Help Found the Communist Party of China

The Communist Party of China was founded just over 100 years ago.

Welcome back to the Chinese Revolution.  Last time, Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles of the People was described.

Now, it’s time to discuss the birth of communism in China.

I will not tell the story of the Russian Revolutions or its civil war here.  But as the 1920s were starting in China, there was an important new regime to China’s north.  The last Russian Czar was dead.  The Russian Empire had been overthrown in a communist revolution led by Vladimir Lenin, and the Communists were close to winning the civil war there.

Karl Marx, the intellectual co-founder of communism, wrote many books.  Among them, he predicted a world revolution led by industrial workers.  The lower classes would rise up, overthrow the wealthy, and form a dictatorship to rule on behalf of those who had previously been oppressed.

The October 1917 revolution had brought Bolshevik Communists to power in Russia and they consolidated power over the next few years.  In March 1919, they founded the Communist International, or Comintern, to help encourage worldwide revolution.  The Communists in Russia wanted to sponsor revolutions in other countries to overthrow capitalism there too.  Those new communist governments could then cooperate with Russia, soon to become the Soviet Union, as the leader.  They also wanted to fight imperialism, which was then part of the dominant mainstream economic and political system.  So, the Comintern supported colonies that wanted to free their nations from the imperialists as a first step before a second communist takeover.

Soviet sponsorship of revolution abroad will be a major theme going forward.  I’ll get into that more in future episodes.  What I’m saying now is that the founding of the Chinese Communist Party was a direct result of the Russian Revolution and the Bolshevik goal to export revolution around the world.  It was the fact that there had been a successful Russian Revolution that attracted support for communism in China.

The first Chinese to notice the Russian Revolution were students.

Two groups of Chinese students paid attention to communism, beginning around 1919.  One group was made up of foreign students in France.  The second, were students in Beijing, especially at Peking University.

In both cases, we might have Cai Yuanpei to thank.  He was the first Minister of Education of the Republic of China.  He was an important part of a decision to send thousands of Chinese students to France.  He himself had studied in Germany the previous decade.  He had also been an early supporter of Sun Yat sen’s Revolutionary Alliance.  Cai decided that he was better suited to academia than revolution, so he pursued further studies in Leipzig, Germany instead and became an important supporting actor.  Cai enabled thousands of Chinese students to go to France.  There, like Zhou Enlai, they picked up on the developing news of socialism and communism in Europe during the First World War and tracked the developments of the Russian Revolution in 1917.

Already in 1912, they had founded a student worker group in France, although then they were more influenced by anarchist than communist ideas.  By 1921, they had a Student-Workers Association and a Chinese Socialist Youth Group.  They had posted the Communist Manifesto.  They then became the French Section of the Chinese Communist Party and before it disappeared in 1923, had 500 members, which was more than the party membership in China at that time.  Many future leaders in the People’s Republic of China, including Premier Zhou Enlai, were among its members.  There were also some Chinese Communists studying in Germany around the same time who later returned to China.

Closer to home, after his term as Minister of Education ended under Yuan Shikai, Cai became Rector of Peking University.  There, he allowed considerable freedom of academic thought.  His words were “Regardless of what schools of academic thought they may be, if their words are reasonable and there is a cause for maintaining them, and they have not yet reached the fate of being eliminated by nature, I would let them develop in complete freedom.”  During the May 4^th movement, he resigned from the university in protest of the government’s actions arresting students.  He did return to his post in the fall.  As I discussed in that episode, the government had to cave to pressure and released the students and fired the three pro-Japanese officials at the center of the protests and China did not sign the Versailles Treaty.  Cai was part of the New Culture movement and the May 4^th movement and his ideas for a new educational system were crucial to the spread of new and revolutionary thinking among Chinese students and especially at Peking University.

A Society for the Study of Socialism was founded in 1919 at Peking University.  A Society for the Study of Marxist Theory appeared in March 1920 and it is not clear if it was an evolution of the first group, or a separate one. 

Also, last episode, I mentioned that Sun Yat-sen envisioned five branches of government.  Well, Cai Yuanpei was the President of the Control Yuan or Control Branch of the Republic of China from 1928-1929 as well.

In June 1920, the Secretary General of the Far Eastern Bureau of the Comintern, Gregory Voitinsky arrived in Beijing, accompanied by a Chinese communist who had been educated in Russia, Yang Ming.  One of the Chinese people that Voitinsky met was Chen Duxiu.

Chen Duxiu was born in Anhui province. His father was a government official.  Chen passed the first level examination before studying naval science.  He studied abroad in Japan from 1900-1902 and he joined the Chinese Youth Society there.  When he returned to China, he lived in Shanghai and worked on the Anhui Vernacular Magazine, one of those publications that wrote in spoken rather than classical Chinese.  He then returned to Japan and then lived in France for three years until 1910.  He wrote an article called France and Contemporary Civilization that showed his love and admiration for France.  He said the world is in France’s debt because of its contribution to political equality, stated in the Declaration of the Rights of Man, science such as Lamarck’s work on the theory of evolution and socialism which would prolong the political revolution and inspire greater justice, he believed.

After the 1911 Revolution, he was appointed Commissar of Education in Anhui province, but left his post after Yuan Shikai increased his control.   Chen spent 1913-1915 in Japan, then living in the French concession in Shanghai.  He founded a review called New Youth and in the first issue he implored Chinese youth to be a force for change. He said that presently “out of ten young men....nine are old in their mentality”.  He encouraged them to “be independent, not servile”, “be men of progress, not bound by routine”, “be brave, not fearful”, “be internationalist, not isolationist”, “be practical, not formalistic” and “be scientific, not imaginative”.

He also stressed both the importance of science and democracy, for instance, he once wrote: “If the Europe of today is ahead of other peoples, it is because scientific development is no less important there than the theory of the rights of man.”

Chen joined the Arts Faculty at Peking University.  In May 1919, his journal New Youth published a special edition on Marxism.  It included an article from Li Dazhao called “My Views on Marxism.”  Chen was jailed that year for distributing writings and his activities and arrest during the May 4^th movement added to his reputation.  New Youth had to stop publishing for some months that year because of Chen’s time in prison and disruptions from the May 4^th movement and government reactions.  Upon his release, he founded the New Youth Society.  And when he took up an education role in Guangzhou, a group was also founded there.

But Chen’s views then were not strictly Marxist.  He seemed interested in a variety of concepts and ideas.  For instance, the stated goals of his New Youth Society, published after the May 4^th Movement, includes these phrases: “We believe that in a true democracy, political rights should be shared among everybody, and even though there may be limitations, work rather than possessions should be the criterion...we will never join any party that supports the interests of the minority or of one class, and does not work for the happiness of society as a whole”.  With these words, Chen sounds more liberal than communist.  Yet, Chen was an important contributor to the founding of the Chinese Communist Party and was elected as its first Secretary – General, which we will get to shortly.  But his variety of views might help explain why he was later removed from that position and then expelled from the Communist Party.  He died in 1942 in Chongqing, which was Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist capital inland during the Second World War.

By the end of 1920, there were branches of a Socialist Youth Corps in Shanghai and Beijing.  A weekly paper called The Voice of Labour was being published out of Beijing.  A monthly magazine, first called Labour Circles and then The Communist, was published out of Shanghai starting in the fall of 1920.  A group in Guangzhou published the Voice of Labour there too.  Small groups were also forming in other cities, like Wuhan and Zhangsha.

Another important contributor to the founding of the communist movement in China was Li Dazhao.   Li was nine years younger than Chen, born in east Hebei, then called Zhili province.  He came from more humble origins and was raised by his grandfather.  He came of age when the government entrance examinations were abolished, and he studied at the Beiyang College of Law and Political Science in Beijing in 1907 and then in Japan for about three years during Yuan Shikai’s Presidency.  He was a nationalist, critical of Yuan and of Japan’s Twenty-One Demands.  His first political writings were about rejecting those demands.  When he returned to China, he lived in Shanghai and then Beijing and joined the New Youth publication, founded by Chen.

Cai Yuanpei then appointed Li as Director of the Peking University Library and then made him a Professor of History.  He held both positions at the same time.  Li collaborated often with Chen on publications.  He too encouraged Chinese youth to turn against tradition and Confucianism.  He saw them as impediments to China adopting Western political and moral ideas.  It was Li who picked up on the importance of the Russian Revolution and introduced China to Marxism in the New Youth publication in May 1919.  The May 4^th Movement was another important influence on Li, pushing him in the direction of communism.  Li also began writing against colonialism and blamed it for the First World War.  He had become radical by the end of 1920.  For instance, he wrote “All the evils of the present Chinese society come from its family system.”  He also defined class struggle and encouraged students to get closer to the peasants and to share their work.  He wanted students to understand them better and to learn from them.

In July 1921, the first congress of the Chinese Communist Party was held in the French concession of Shanghai.  Even though they had freedom of assembly in that foreign territory, they still were worried about police infiltration and soon relocated to a boat on a nearby lake for more privacy.  Twelve Chinese Communists were present, along with a delegate from the Comintern, a Dutch Communist Henk Sneevliet.  The twelve Chinese represented seven regions in China and were said to be there on behalf of 57 party members.  Li was there as part of the Beijing group.  Chen was not there but was a member of the Shanghai organization and might have founded it.  He might also have founded the Guangzhou group. Mao Zedong was one of those founding Chinese Communists at the meeting.  He was 28 years old and representing his Hunan province.  He was not elected to any national position at the first meeting.  Chen was elected Secretary-General, even though he was not present, and three were elected to the first executive.  One of those three was Li and he oversaw Propaganda.  Li would become a martyr of the party in 1927, when he was killed by the Manchurian Warlord, who was mentioned two episodes ago.

I’ll return to the early days of the Chinese Communist Party soon.

Li Dazhao