Background
Chen Duxiu was born in 1879 in Huaining County, Anhui Province, China.
(Chen Duxiu (1879-1942) founded the Chinese Communist Part...)
Chen Duxiu (1879-1942) founded the Chinese Communist Party in 1921. Eleven years later, 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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(Chen Duxiu was the leading figure in the New Culture Move...)
Chen Duxiu was the leading figure in the New Culture Movement and the co-founder of the Chinese Communist Party. The Party, however, only acknowledged his contribution at the early stage of the party’s development while negating his later accomplishments. Having spent 30 years in studying and writing about Chen Duxiu, Tang Baolin, the author of this encyclopaedic maserpiece showcased the life and times of Chen Duxiu – his distinct personality, his complicated relationship with the Party and China’s revolution. It presents readers a well-rounded Chen Duxiu.
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(This book is the first complete study of Chen Duxiu, the ...)
This book is the first complete study of Chen Duxiu, the controversial founder and first secretary-general of the Chinese Communist party. Disputing many conventional views of the New Culture movement and the early history of the party, Lee Feigon examines the social and political context of Chen's ideas and actions, particularly his relationship with the early Chinese youth movement. Originally published in 1983. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
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Chen Duxiu was born in 1879 in Huaining County, Anhui Province, China.
Chen was given a traditional Confucian education by his grandfather, several private tutors, and his elder brother.Chen took and passed the county-level imperial examination in 1896, and succeeded in the provincial-level examination the following year. He later wrote a sardonic memoir in which he reminisced about the filthy conditions, the dishonesty, and the incompetence that he observed when taking the official examinations. 1898, he passed the entrance exam and became a student of Qiushi Academy (currently Zhejiang University) in Hangzhou, where he studied French, English, and naval architecture. He moved to Nanjing in 1902, after he was reported to have given speeches attacking the Qing government, and then to Japan the same year under a scholarship from the government to study at the Tokyo Shimbu Gakko, a military preparatory academy. It was in Japan where Chen became influenced by socialism and the growing Chinese dissident movement. While studying in Japan, Chen helped to found two radical political parties, but refused to join Sun Yat-sen's Tongmenghui Revolutionary Alliance, which he regarded as narrowly racist. In 1908, he accepted a teaching position at the Army Elementary School in Hangzhou. A thorough knowledge of Confucian literary and philosophical works was the pre-requisites for civil service in Imperial China. Chen was an exceptional student, but his poor experiences taking the Confucian civil service exams resulted in a lifelong tendency to advocate unconventional beliefs and to criticize traditional ideas.
In 1898, Chen supported the abortive reform led by Kang Youwei. Between 1902 and 1906 Chen made two trips to Japan in search for new ideas. In 1907 he traveled to France and came under the influence of the revolutionary tradition of that country. He returned home in 1910 and established a network of Chinese patriots, many of whom became members of the Tongmenhui (Chinese United League) that was instrumental in the Republican Revolution of 1911.
In the New Culture Movement of 1915-1927, Chen Duxiu established himself as the spokesman for a generation of Chinese intelligentsia who wanted to fundamentally change Chinese society by adopting Western ideology. In 1915, he founded the Youth Magazine, a magazine that was almost synonymous with cultural iconoclasm of the May Fourth era. It was renamed New Youth the following year. In 1917, Chen Duxiu was invited by Cai Yuanpei, chancellor of Beijing University to take charge of the university's School of Letters. In 1918 he cofounded and coedited the Weekly Review (Meizhou pinglun), a forum for social reform and nationalist revolution.
Disappointed by the lack of progress and concerned about the continuous national crisis in China, Chen sought to save his country by changing its culture. In his writings, he loudly championed an intellectual revolution spearheaded by a new literature. Such a revolution, Chen claimed, was aimed at the destruction of the “aristocratic literature” that was “nothing but literary chiseling and flattery” and the creation of “a simple, expressive literature of the people.” It was also intended to smash the “outmoded, showy, classical literature" and to construct a Kfresh and sincere literature of realism."
Out of frustration by the stultifying political system in the 1910s and 1920s, Chen became increasingly radical in his world outlook. In his articles on contemporary politics, he vehemently exposed the sham of the republi-canism in the Beijing government and evil doings of China’s social and political establishment. Under Chen's auspices, contributors to New Youth placed faith in democracy and science as the keys to China's rebirth and called for a wholesale liquidation of the foot-dragging elements in China's traditional culture. They also saw individualism as the starting point of a social revolution and promoted free thinking and expression as preconditions for the development of a new citizenry. Chen’s view of life was positive and optimistic. In an article published in 1918, Chen Duxiu gave the following definition of the ultimate purpose of life: “During his lifetime, an individual should devote his efforts to create happiness and to enjoy it, and also to keep it in store in society so that individuals of the future may also enjoy it, one generation doing the same for the next and so on unto infinity."
As a patriot, Chen was angered by the power politics at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. He immediately condemned the hypocrisy of Western allies and pointed out the dangers in the peace settlement. In an article in the New Youth, he wrote, KEach country in the Paris Peace Conference is merely interested in the promotion of its own interests. Justice, eternal peace, and President Wilson’s ‘Fourteen Points’ are all empty talks, not worth even one penny. The Paris Peace Conference is miles away from eternal peace and human happiness. The people of the world have to stand up to solve the problem of peace themselves.”
In the same period, Chen Duxiu became interested in Marxism and came to see Marxism and the Russian Revolution of 1917 as the gospel for the Chinese people. With assistance from the Third Communist International or Comintern, he began to organize Chinese communists and socialists into a cohesive movement. Even though Chen Duxiu did not attend the Hrst Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in July 1921, he was elected the general secretary of the Party and remained at the top of the CCP until 1927. During the First United Front between the CCP and the Nationalist Party (Guomindang or GMD) between 1923 and 1927, Chen repeatedly proposed the withdrawal of the CCP from the alliance because of the animosity of the GMD's right wing. Each time, he was overruled by the Comintern.
A believer in orthodox Marxism, however, Chen believed that the predominantly rural Chinese society was not ready for a socialist revolution in the 1920s. Thus when faced with growing violence in the mass movement during the Northern Expedition in 1926-1928, Chen cautioned his party against excessive radicalism in the hope of avoiding unnecessary loss of lives. After Jiang Jieshi's coup in Shanghai in April 1927, the Communist Party was forced to go underground and Chen thereafter lost control of the Chinese Communist movement.
In 1929, Chen Duxiu came under the ideological influence of the Russian Communist leader Leon Trotsky and became a caustic critic of the Comintern. He asked the CCP to free itself from foreign control and focus on the struggle for workers’ power in a parliamentary democracy and unionist movement. At the same time, he asked the CCP to give up armed struggle in the countryside. In 1931, Chen Duxiu and some Trotskyites in the Communist Party organized the CCP Left Wing Opposition in Shanghai and advocated orthodox Marxism in its official publication Sparks.
In 1932, Chen was arrested by the Nationalist government and remained in prison until 1937. In 1938 he left the CCP, apparently tired of the factional struggle in the party and shocked by the political purges in the Soviet Union. He condemned Stalin's tyranny and theoretically forsook proletarian dictatorship as the path toward socialism. He finally realized that neither Leninism nor Trotskyism was a solution to China’s problems. Instead, he came to see Western parliamentary democracy and constitutionalism as China’s new hope.
Chen died on May 27, 1942, in Baisha, Jiangjin county, Sichuan province.
(This book is the first complete study of Chen Duxiu, the ...)
(Chen Duxiu was the leading figure in the New Culture Move...)
(Chen Duxiu (1879-1942) founded the Chinese Communist Part...)
Chen was a major campaigner for the modemization of China and a severe critic of the Confucian Iradition. Before the May Fourth incident in 1919, he saw the key to China’s advance in Western democracy and science and argued for a new culture based on modern economic life and on individual autonomy in ethics. He was an instigator of the New Culture Movement and supported Hu Shi’s campaign for vernacular literary reform.
He saw cultural change as a precondition of political reform. After the May Fourth Movement, for which his ideas provided intellectual inspiration, he joined Li Dazhao as one of China’s first two major Marxist theorists. Chen supported materialism, class struggle, revolution and the inevitability of socialism in China under the dictatorship of the proletariat.
He opposed China’s earlier radical movement of anarchism. He was open to reformist and pragmatist ideas, and tried to influence Hu Shi towards Marxism. Internal party rivalries as well as his programme of seeking to realize a broadly based democratic revolution led to his political fall.
Chen felt that his articles should reflect the needs of society. He believed that the progress of society could not be achieved without those who accurately report social weaknesses and sicknesses.
Chen's articles were always expressive. He criticized the traditional Chinese officials as corrupt and guilty of other wrongdoings. He was under constant attack from conservatives in China, and had to flee to Japan four times. In China, he spent much of his life in the French Concession and the Shanghai International Settlement in order to pursue his writing and scholarly activities free from official harassment.
Chen's articles strove to attract publicity, and often arouse discussion by using hyperbole. He emphasized his sadness about the backwardness and corruption in China so that people suffering would be willing to send him their opinions. In New Youth, he wrote various articles using pseudonyms to form "discussions", in order to arouse public interest.[citation needed]
Chen's publications emphasized the responses from their audience. In New Youth there were forums and citizens' columns. On average, there were 6 letters from the public in each issue. Whether in praise or strong opposition, Chen encouraged all to write. He also thought that teamwork was very important in journalism, and consequently asked for help from many talented authors and journalists, including Hu Shih and Lu Xun.