Background
Ch’ii Ch’iu-pai was born into an impoverished gentry family in Ch’ang-chou, Kiangsu, on January 29, 1899. His grandfather, Ch’ii Keng-shao, was financial commissioner of Hupeh and for a while acting governor of that province; the fortune he left to the family had afforded Ch’ii a rather comfortable childhood but was quickly dissipated by Ch’ii’s father, Ch’ii Chih-pin, a shiftless individual who smoked opium and indulged in occult Taoism. He finally abandoned his wife and six children, of whom Ch’ii Ch’iu-pai was the oldest, and went to Shantung to serve as a family tutor. Ch’ii’s mother, Chin Heng-yii, the daughter of a one-time salt-intendant of Kwangtung and a woman of some education, had no means of maintaining the family other than to pawn or sell the family’s meager possessions.
Education
Nevertheless, Ch’ii attended school, first at the Kuan-ying Primary School and later at the Ch’ang-chou Middle School. Among his classmates at the latter was Chang T’ai-lei, the future hero of the Canton Uprising, and until his death a staunch supporter of Ch’ii in the intra-Party power struggle. Barely within graduation, Ch’ii was forced to leave school for financial reasons, after which he taught primary school for a while. Then in February 1915 the most tragic event of his youth occurred when his mother took her own life in despair over her grim poverty. Whereupon Ch’ii, his brothers, and sister were divided among various relatives as wards.
It is evident that these years of misery in his youth engendered the impulse of his subsequent renunciation of his “genteel” past and made him a most implacable iconoclast. In 1915 he went to Wuchang to live with his second cousin, Ch’ii Ch’un-pai. For a few months he studied English at the Foreign Language College at Hankow. He gave that up and then went to live with another cousin, Chou Chun-liang, who encouraged him in composing Chinese poetry for which he had developed a taste in school, as well as in studying Buddhist scriptures. Buddhism was then providing a refuge for many a contemporary from the toils and bewilderment of ubiquitous chaos and was to have some influence on his outlook.
In 1916 he moved to Peking with Ch’un-pai and hoped to continue his education at Peking University. He passed the entrance examination but could not pay the fees although he was allowed to audit. He took the examination for civil servants but was unsuccessful. Finally, in the summer of 1917, he gained admission to the Russian Language Institute, a tuition-free school established by the Peiyang government for the training of personnel for diplomacy and positions in the Chinese Eastern Railway. Ch’ii selected the literature department and studied Russian and French. Here began a long and abiding interest in Russian literature, which, to his subsequent regret, he gave up in exchange for a consuming and abortive political career. He was particularly drawn to Tolstoy, his brand of anarchism, and Gogol, whose works he attempted to translate. For a brief time Buddhism and Tolstoyan anarchism kept his mind occupied, but he was soon carried along in the rising tide of nationalism and “new culture,” and he immersed himself in the plethora of journals, carriers of every conceivable wisp of new ideas, which shaped the minds of many of his generation. He actively engaged in the May Fourth student movement and led a group of students of the Russian Language Institute in the June 5 demonstrations. He was arrested and imprisoned for three days along with many others. According to him, he sustained an internal injury in the violence that broke out, which accounted for the periodic bloodspittings which punctuated his hectic career.
Career
In March 1920 Ch’ii joined the She-hui chu-i hsiao-tsu (Socialist study group), which Li Ta- chao had organized at Peking University, and he developed toward Marxism, although his final conversion took place only after he had been in Soviet Russia. For a brief time he displayed some interest in the emancipation of women. In April 1920, he finished a translation of Socialization of Society, by the German socialist August Bebel (1840-1913).
Upon graduation from the Institute, he accepted the appointment of special correspondent in Moscow for Peking’s leading daily, Ch’en-pao. He regarded it as a unique opportunity to continue his study of the Russian language and literature as well as to visit the “promised land. On October 16, 1920, he left Peking in the company of two other correspondents, Yii Sung-hua and Li Tsung-wu. The party finally reached Moscow on January 25, 1921, after months of dark bread and the rigors of the Siberian winter. The long trip provided the opportunity for an introspective autobiography O-hsiang chi-ch'eng (A journey to the land of hunger), which depicted his progression from the dark despair of his past to the new-born hope of the October Revolution, and distant Moscow, the Holy City, had a hypnotic effect on him. He conceived of his mission as that of ripping open the curtain of darkness over China to let in the new rays.
During his two-year sojourn in Moscow his activities were varied. He investigated and wrote about conditions and developments in the “new” Russia, which appeared from time to time in Ch’en-pao as well as in the Shih-shih hsin-pao (Current news) of Shanghai. These reports constituted the earliest on-the-spot observations by a Chinese of their kind on a country about which the reading public craved information. Subsequently, he put his amassed materials into a book, which he called O-lo-szu koming lun (On the Russian Revolution).
He also applied himself to the study of the Russian language and literature with the aid of a tutor, one of the results of which was a historical survey of Russian literature before the October Revolution, the earliest of its kind in Chinese. This was incorporated by Chiang Kuang-tz’u, another specialist in Russian literature, in his volume O-lo-szu wen-hsueh (Russian literature).
In June 1921 he attended the Third Congress of the Comintern, still in the capacity of a correspondent, and his classmate, Chang T’ai-lei, now secretary of the Socialist Youth League, represented the CCP. Another Chinese present was Kiang (Chiang) K’ang-hu, who attended the Congress in the name of his Chinese Socialist Party. However, he had gone to Soviet Russia primarily to investigate conditions there and to formulate a program for his projected party.
The May 30 Movement (1925) derived much of its leadership from the young Communists at Shanghai University; prominent among the leaders were Li Li-san, Ts’ai Ho-sen, Yun Tai-ying, and Ch’ii Ch’iu-pai. As usual, Ch’ii was most effective with the pen, and he edited the Jo-hsueh jih-pao (Ardent daily), which began on June 4 and ran for 24 issues before it was closed down by the police.
In the spring of 1926 Ch’ii was laid up by another relapse of tuberculosis, but by August he was in Canton lecturing at Mao Tse-tung’s Peasants’ Movement Training Institute on the subject of “The Peasant Problem in the National Revolution.” At the end of the year he was back in Shanghai and played a key role in planning the Shanghai uprisings in February-March 1927, which enabled the workers to take Shanghai. After this, he was ordered to Wuhan in March 1927 to be political instructor at the Wuhan branch of the Central Military Academy (formerly the Whampoa Academy).
His arrival at Wuhan made him the center of rallying forces hostile to the Ch’en Tu-hsiu-P’eng Shu-chih leadership of the CCP. The dissensions within the CCP in the early half of 1927 leading virtually to a breakdown of Party discipline and paralysis at the top were, in retrospect, more results of personal issues than matters of principle. Ch’ii lined up behind himself the Communist Youth League, led by Jen Pi-shih, which had been impatient with the limitations imposed by the nature of the KMT-CCP alliance. He also had the support of P’eng P’ai, Lo Ch’i-yuan, and especially Mao Tse-tung, who were exasperated by Ch’en Tu-hsiu’s seeming lack of appreciation of the rural upsurge; Mao demanded a policy of total confiscation of land. Earlier, according to Yang Chih-hua, it seemed that P’eng Shu-chih, an editor of the Hsiang-tao chou-pao (no doubt acting at the behest of Ch’en Tu-hsiu), had declined to publish Mao’s third installment of his renowned “Report of an Investigation into the Peasant Movement in Hunan” in the interest of maintaining surface harmony with the KMT. Ch’ii, however volunteered to publish the full text as a book, and even wrote a preface for it. Yet another source of support came from Ts’ai Ho-sen, who evidently was settling a personal score with P’eng and Ch’en the former having seduced his wife and the latter having failed to discipline his protégé.
In December 1933 Ch’ü left Shanghai for Juichin. In January-February 1934 he attended the Second All-China Congress of Soviets and was re-elected a member of the Central Executive Committee, and in early February he was made commissar of Education. (He had been elected to both these positions at the First Congress in November 1931, but he was not present at Juichin to fill them). On April 1, he was appointed head of the Shen Tse-min University. Poor health prevented too many exertions, so the results of his work, according to his own accounts, were meager. He established a system of Leninist primary schools, edited teaching materials, organized literacy classes, and founded a Leninist teachers’ college to train primary school teachers.
In October 1934 the Soviet government and the Red Army evacuated Juichin and set out on the Long March. Ch’ii was too ill to accompany them and was left behind in Kiangsi as chief of the Propaganda Department, along with Hsiang Ying, vice-chairman of the Kiangsi Soviet, Teng Tzu-hui, chairman of the Fukien Soviet, and Ho Shu-heng, an old Party veteran who with Mao Tse-tung formed the Hunanese delegation at the founding Congress of the CCP in July 1921. By February 1935 the pressure of KMT troops had made their position on the Fukien-Kiangsi border highly untenable. In the course of seeking refuge, Ch’ii was captured at Shang-hang in southwestern Fukien on March 20 and was kept at the prison in T’ing-chou (Ch’ang-t’ing), western Fukien, where he spent about three months. Lu Hsun and Ts’ai Yuan-p’ei interceded in vain on his behalf. During that period he wrote the third part of his introspective trilogy, entitled Gо-ум ti hua (Superfluous words), in which he reflected on his past, especially on the events of his political career. Along with the several lyrics which he composed in prison, one discerns that he had returned to his earlier Buddhist outlook although he felt unable to renounce his Marxist beliefs. On June 18, he was executed at the age of 36.
Politics
Ch’ii’s loss of influence within the Chinese Communist movement inside China was offset by his gain of a position of some prestige in the international Communist movement where he was known by his Russian name, Strakhov (a Russian translation of his surname, both meaning “fear”). He was made chief of the Chinese delegation to the Comintern, which included four other members: Teng Chung-hsia, Chang Kuo-t’ao, Huang P’ing, and Yu Fei. Ch’ti was also a member of the Presidium of the ECO.
In August 1928, at the Sixth Comintern Con¬gress, he delivered a co-report on the national and colonial question entitled “The Lessons of the Chinese Revolution.” In connection with the Comintern, he attended the Anti-Imperialist Congress in Paris in the fall of 1929 and the Conference of the Unemployed in Berlin in the summer of 1930.
Another area in which he achieved some reputation while in the Soviet Union was the field of Chinese linguistics. In 1928 he was elected a member of the Institute of Scientific Research on China, which was attached to Sun Yat-sen University and which in the following year was engaged in the project of devising a latinized Chinese alphabet (the purpose being to facilitate the education of Chinese domiciled in Siberia). Ch’ii worked with two Soviet Sinologues, V. S. Kolokolov and A. A. Dragunov, and two other Chinese, Lin Po-ch’Li and Wu Yii-chang. Ch’ii’s study was the subject of a conference on May 23, 1930, at the institute, and was published in the same year in Moscow under the title Chung-kuo Latinxua tzu-mu (Chinese latinized alphabet).
While in Moscow, he was involved in one of the fiercest but little known factional fights, sometimes referred to as the Sun Yat-sen University case. In brief, it involved, on the one hand, Pavel Mif and his protégés (see under Ch’cn Shao-yü) and on the other hand Ch’ii Ch’iu-pai and the Chinese delegation to the Comintern. Pavel Mif, who was Stalin’s China expert during 1925-1927, had by the end of 1927 replaced Karl Radek as rector of Sun Yat-sen University and as chief of the Chinese Sec¬tion of the Comintern’s Far Eastern Bureau. At the Sixth CCP Congress, two evenly balanced groups, the “left,” consisting of Chou En-lai, Ch’ii Ch’iu-pai and Li Li-san, and the “right,” consisting of Ts’ai Ho-sen, Hsiang Ying, and Chang Kuo-t’ao, vied for the post of general secretary and control over the CCP. Mif resolved the deadlock by choosing Hsiang Chung-fa without satisfying all the leaders. Ch’ii was as keen to make a political comeback in China as Mif was to dominate the Chinese Communist movement. The latter’s strategy was to plant his Chinese protégés, the so-called Russian-returned students or the “28 Bolsheviks,” in China as the new power group. At Sun Yat-sen University these men had gained control of the CCP branch and their high-handed policies (as well as Mif’s education and administrative policies at the university) had alienated a considerable part of the student body. Thus, by attacking Mif’s policies in the university, Ch’ii, Chang Kuo-t’ao, and others of the Chinese Comintern delegation were in effect lining up the enemies of Mif and his Chinese protégés for a showdown.
