Background
Ch'en Tu-hsiu was born in 1879 and was the son of a wealthy family in Huaining, Anhwei Province.
(Chen Duxiu (1879-1942) founded the Chinese Communist Part...)
Chen Duxiu (1879-1942) founded the Chinese Communist Party in 1921, after a revolutionary career in the movement that overthrew the Manchus and brought in the Republic. Between 1915 and 1919, he led the remarkable New Culture Movement that electrified student youth and laid the intellectual foundations for modern China. In 1929, he helped found the Chinese Trotskyist Opposition, which he then led. In 1932 he went to prison for seeking to overthrow the government. Between his release in 1937 and his death in 1942, he wrote the letters and articles collected in this volume.
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(Ch'en Tu-hsiu (1879-1942, former Dean of the School of Le...)
Ch'en Tu-hsiu (1879-1942, former Dean of the School of Letters at Peking University, was the most important leader of the Chinese intellectual revolution (the May Fourth Movement) and the founder of the Chinese Communist Party. For more than a decade (1915-1927), he stood out as an intellectual giant and an undisputable radical revolutionary leader. Even today, many of Ch'en's original ideas, particularly those of anti-Confucianism and anti-tradition, are still the very revolutionary ideologies of the People's Republic of China. Yet, until now, there is no single scholarly work in any language to provide a comprehensive and unbiased account of Ch'en's life and activities, his ideas and personality, and most important, his contributions in later years to the drastic transformation of China to a modern state in its political, economic, and social spectra. This book is partly an intellectual and political biography of Ch'en Tu-Hsui, and partly a study of how Chinese intellectuals, using Ch'en as a case study, advocated "democracy" and "science" in the 1910s and 1920s turned to the Communist movement in order to transform their static country into a modern state, but eventually perished with their ideas under another revolutionary wave. This study attempts to establish the interrelationship between the consciousness of man and the rapidly changing conditions of China in that period, thereby putting Ch'en in proper perspective, and restoring him to a place of dignity in the history of Modern China.
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Ch'en Tu-hsiu was born in 1879 and was the son of a wealthy family in Huaining, Anhwei Province.
Ch'en Tu-hsiu received a classical education. In 1896 he passed the lowest-level civil service examination but failed to obtain a higher degree.
During the first decade of the 20th century he pursued a modern education in China, Japan, and France. He also helped to edit a series of magazines and served as a teacher and dean. After the Revolution of 1911 Ch'en headed the Anhwei Department of Education until forced by Yüan Shih-k'ai to flee to Japan in 1913. There he helped his friend Chang Shihchao to edit Chia-yin tsa-chih (Tiger Magazine). Upon the suppression of this publication, Ch'en went to the foreign concession in Shanghai. In 1915 he began to publish his most famous magazine, Ch'ing-nien tsa-chih (Youth Magazine). Though sympathetic to the revolution, Ch'en was concerned more with cultural and social changes than with political change. A Francophile, he championed equality, democracy, and science and denounced Confucianism. More a pamphleteer than a systematic philosopher, Ch'en was widely influential. In 1917 the chancellor of Peking University, Ts'ai Yüan-p'ei, invited him to become dean of the College of Letters at National Peking University (Peita). Surrounded by kindred souls of the literary renaissance, Ch'en made his magazine, now called the Hsin Ch'ing-nien (New Youth), the voice of the intellectual avant-grade. In 1918, outraged at the misgovernment of Tuan Ch'ijui's Anhwei Clique, Ch'en and Li Ta-chao, professor and librarian at the University, formed the Mei-chou p'inglun (Weekly Critic) to serve as a platform of attack against the government's domestic and foreign policies. The paper helped prepare the ground for the May Fourth movement, a nationwide protest sparked by the Peking student demonstration of May 4, 1919. Targets of this assault were the Versailles powers, who had given Shantung Province to Japan, and the Peking officials, who had connived in this treachery. Birth of the Chinese Communist Party Swept along by the movement, Ch'en was jailed by the government for nearly 3 months. Upon release he resigned from Peita and returned to Shanghai. There he became a Marxist. In the summer of 1920, after discussions with Comintern agent Gregory Voitinsky, Ch'en organized a Communist nucleus and was instrumental in establishing similar groups elsewhere. In Shanghai he set about organizing students and workers, and in August the Socialist Youth League was formed to train future party members. A foreign-language school prepared students for study in Russia; one of its first graduates was Liu Shao-ch'i. In December 1920 Ch'en accepted an offer from the progressive warlord Ch'en Chiung-ming to head Kwangtung's provincial education department. He took the opportunity to organize a Communist nucleus in Canton. In July 1921 the First Congress of the Chinese Communist party (CCP) unanimously elected Ch'en Tu-hsiu secretary of the Central Committee. Returning to Shanghai, Ch'en met with the Dutch Comintern representative, Maring. The Comintern agreed to provide funds, and Ch'en agreed to accept Commintern discipline. The implications of the agreement became clear a year later, when Ch'en reluctantly agreed to follow Comintern policy by joining an alliance with the Kuomintang. Ch'en feared that the party of the proletariat would be swallowed up by this organ of the bourgeoisie. However, after attending the Comintern congress in Moscow in November-December 1922 and witnessing the weakness of the workers' movement in the Peking-Hankow railway strike of February 1923, he actively supported the new policy. In June 1923 he was elected secretary generalof the party. Ch'en was nonetheless unenthusiastic about continued cooperation with the Kunomintang. Because the Kuomintang polarized after President Sun Yat-sen's death in March 1925, the alliance came under attack from within the Kuomintang as well. After the anti-Communist purges by Chiang Kai-shek in March 1926 and April 1927, Ch'en pleaded for an end to the alliance but was overruled by the Comintern. With the split between Chiang's government in Nanking and the "left" Kuomintang regime in Wuhan, Ch'en followed Comintern orders and allied the CCP with the Wuhan faction. However, he came under growing opposition within the party, because of personal and regional jealousies and because he had become the scapegoat for the Comintern's miscalculations. Ch'en was branded a "Trotskyite, " and, at a secured emergency conference on Aug. , 7, 1927, he was replaced by Ch'ü Ch'iu-pai. Expulsion and Imprisonment For the next 15 years Ch'en lived in Shanghai, where he continued to write and to be active in party affairs. Ch'en followed an independent line which placed him at odds with the new leadership. He finally was expelled from the party for criticizing its support of the Soviet Union in the Chinese Eastern Railroad dispute of mid-1929. Having been falsely branded a Trotskyite in 1927, Ch'en became a real Trotskyite in 1929. Though bitterly attacked as "liquidationists" by the Central Committee, in 1931 Ch'en and his followers finally brought several splinter groups together in a united Trotskyite organization, the Chinese Communist Party Left Opposition Faction. Though the new group suffered from factional rivalries and was completely ineffective, Ch'en was arrested by the Nationalists on Oct. 15, 1932, and charged with endangering the republic. Sentenced to 15 years' imprisonment, he turned a deaf ear to Nationalist supplications to cooperate with the Nanking government. While in prison he devoted himself to his old passion, linguistic studies. After the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War, Ch'en was released under a general amnesty. He announced his support of the united front against Japan and his refusal to identify with any political group. He fled from the advancing Japanese to Wuhan, Changsha, Chungking, and finally, because of poor health, to retirement in a small town 45 miles from the wartime capital. In letters and essays written from 1940 to 1942 Ch'en reaffirmed his faith in individual freedom and democratic socialism, but he equated the repressive orthodoxy of Soviet communism with Confucianism, both being incompatible with these goals. Ch'en died on May 27, 1942.
(Ch'en Tu-hsiu (1879-1942, former Dean of the School of Le...)
(Chen Duxiu (1879-1942) founded the Chinese Communist Part...)
