Background
Li Dazhao was born in 1879 in Leting County, Hebei Province, China.
(I will overthrow the emperor like Hong Xiuquan when I gro...)
I will overthrow the emperor like Hong Xiuquan when I grow up, said the young Li Dazhao impassionedly when he heard about the story of Hong Xiuquan in school. When he grew up, the emperor had been overthrown but he faced a world full of warlords and destitute people. The victory of the October Revolution inspired and encouraged him greatly and brought hope to him. He wrote many articles and made many speeches publicizing Marxism-Leninism. He is the earliest person publicizing Marxism and one of the founders of the Communist Party of China, and he also devoted his whole life to the cause of communism.
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(Li Dazhao is among the most honored and respected persons...)
Li Dazhao is among the most honored and respected persons in Chinese History even today. He is considered to be a “Great Father” to the modern Chinese People. Li Dazhao was born on October 29, 1889. He co- founded Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1921. He worked as a librarian at the Beijing University Library and was among the first of the Chinese intellectuals who supported the Bolshevik government in the USSR. Chairman Mao was an assistant librarian during Li’s tenure at the library and Li was one of Mao’s earliest and most prominent influences. By many accounts, Li was a nationalist and believed that the peasantry in China were to play an important role in China’s revolution. Under the leadership of Li, the CCP developed a close relationship with the Comintern. At the direction of the Comintern, Li was inducted into Sun Yat-sen’s Guomindang Party in 1922. Li was elected to the Guomindang’s Central Executive Committee in 1924. The CCP’s relationship with the Guomindang was controversial, particularly to many members of the CCP and the relationship gradually deteriorated. Tensions between the Comintern, the Guomindang, and the CCP presented opportunities for political intrigue and opportunism. As part of early efforts to liquidate communists, mass detentions of suspected communists began in early 1927. During the during a raid on the Soviet Embassy in Guangzhou, Li was captured and, with nineteen others, he was executed on the orders of the Manchurian General Zhang Zuolin (Chang Tso-lin) on April 28, 1927. Ishi Press has launched a program where we are reprinting out of print books in Chinese. These are books that we believe are no longer readily available in China but nevertheless should be preserved. These titles are concerned primarily with Chinese traditional medicine including Chinese herbal medicine and acupuncture, Chinese massage, Chinese literature and Chinese history plus the Holy Bible translated into Chinese. These books are all entirely in Chinese. Some are in Simplified Chinese. Others are in Traditional Chinese. These are not translations except that the titles have been translated into English. Thus far, all of these books were first published before 1998 but after 1949.
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Li Dazhao was born in 1879 in Leting County, Hebei Province, China.
Li Dazhao entered the North Sea College of Law and Political Science in Tianjin in 1907. There he came under the influence of some members of the Tongmenhui (Chinese United League), which was instrumental in overthrowing the Manchu Dynasty in 1911. In 1913, Li went to Japan to study political science at Waseda University in Tokyo.
In 1916, he returned home to join the struggle against Yuan Shikai who was trying to restore monarchy in China. During this time, however, Li also maintained a close tie with the Progressive Party that advocated conservative reformism and constitutional monarchy. For a brief period of time, he edited The Morning Bell, a newspaper sponsored by the Party. In late 1916, he broke with the Progressive Party and resigned as editor of The Morning Bell. In the following year, Li became closely associated with some radical intellectuals in Beijing, especially Chen Duxiu, dean of the School of Letters at Beijing University and the most eloquent spokesman for the New Culture movement.
In 1918, Li Daozhao joined the faculty of Beijing University and became the head of the school’s library. Thereafter, he became Chen Duxiu’s close ally in championing the New Culture movement. He not only edited the New Youth, then a forum for China's most restless youth, but also founded and cofounded radical publications such as the Weekly Review and Young China Monthly. In these periodicals, Li published a series of articles advocating revolutionary changes. Unhappy about the anarchy under the sham of republicanism of his time, Li found hope in the Russian Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. In the Victory of Bolshevism, published in the November 15, 1918 issue of the New Youth, Li hailed the Russian Revolution as a crusade of the downtrodden against the evil system of capitalism and as a model for the Chinese people in their fight against Western imperialism for modern nationhood. "In the course of such a world mass movement", he wrote "all those dregs of history which can impede the progress of the new movement such as emperors, nobles, warlords, bureaucrats, militarism, capitalism will certainly be destroyed as though struck by a thun-derbolt". By the same token, he rejected the political gradualism advocated by Western educated intellectuals such as Hu Shi.
Using his office at the Beijing University library as a base, Li Dazhao established an informal study group, where a dozen or so professors and students met frequently to exchange their views on various political and philosophical issues. His study group, together with other groups of Chinese socialists, laid the foundation for the CCP. After the founding of the CCP in 1921, Li served on the executive committee of the CCP in the Beijing area and was elected to the Central Com-mittee of the Third and Fourth Congresses of the Party. As the regional director of the Chinese Labor Movement (Zhongguo Laodong zuhe shujibu) in north China, Li also organized strikes in Kailuan Coal Mines, Beijing-Shuiyuan Railroad, and Beijing-Hankou Railroad. In 1922-1923, he facilitated the First United Front between the CCP and the Nationalist Party (Guomindang or GMD). In 1924, Li joined the GMD and was elected to the executive committee of the GMD. In June, Li led a delegation of the CCP to attend the Fifth Congress of the Third Communist International or the Comintern in Moscow.
While imbibing Marxism Leninism, Li Dazhao was apparently aware ot the obvious gap between the Western philosophy of proletarian revolution and China’s social realities. China was a rural nation and the vast majority of its population was peasants. For Li, the liberation of the peasants was an integral part of China's national revolution and prerequisite for China s national rebirth. The mainstay of the Chinese revolution was, by necessity, the peasant masses. Because of this, the future of the Chinese revolution hinged on whether the revolutionary intelligentsia could awaken the largely illiterate masses with a revolutionary ideology. He said passionately that the task facing Chinese revolutionaries was to reach out to the peasants and help them to know that “they should demand revolution, to speak out about their sufferings, to throw their ignorance and be people who will themselves plan their own lives.w By merging with the peasants, Li reasoned, the Chinese intelligentsia would also achieve their own social and political salvation. His ideas, while indicating the difficulty in adapting Marxist theory to Chinese circumstances, apparently influenced many younger Chinese Marxists, including Mao Zedong and Qu Qiubai, both of whom later became leaders of the CCP.
(I will overthrow the emperor like Hong Xiuquan when I gro...)
(Li Dazhao is among the most honored and respected persons...)
After early support for the New Culture Movement and criticism of the Confucian tradition, Li responded to the Russian Revolution by writing extensively about Marxism, especially historical materialism. He and Chen Duxiu were China’s first major Marxist theorists. For Li, the world was not static, and development occurred as a result of struggle between opposites, including those drawn from Chinese tradition, such as yin and yang.
Progressive ideology had a role in social change, but he gave primacy to dialectical relations between forces and relations of production and between base and superstructure. He endorsed Marx's theory of revolution, class struggle and the necessity of a dictatorship of the proletariat. In a famous controversy with Hu Shi in 1919, Li argued for total revolutionary change in opposition to Hu’s proposals for piecemeal reform.
Li’s work shaped Marxist ethical thinking in China. He argued that morals had to evolve in relation to changing social circumstances and later saw morals as part of the superstructure determined by a developing economic base. He criticized traditional Chinese morality, which he saw as related to the clan system, feudal economy and autocracy.
He argued the need for interdependent moral and economic revolutions and held that each was bound to fail without the other.