Background
Li Lisan was born on 18 November 1899 in Liling, Hunan, China.
Li Lisan was born on 18 November 1899 in Liling, Hunan, China.
Li Lisan was a native of Liling, Hunan province in central China. As a young man, Li was concerned about China s national crisis and anxious to find a remedy for China's social and political problems. In 1919, Li went to France on work-study programs, where he came under the influence of European socialist ideology. Upon his return to China in 1921, he joined the infant Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
A superb orator and organizer, Li became actively involved in China s labor movement. He orchestrated the famous strike of the Anyuan Coal Miners in Hunan province in 1922 and the May 30th demonstration of 1925 in Shanghai. In 1927, Li was elected to the Central Committee of the CCP at the Party's Fifth Congress. In the summer of this year, when the First United Front between the Chinese Communists and Nationalists (Guomindang or GMD) was laid in ruins, Li participated in the Nanchang Uprising which marked the birth of the CCP’s partisan army. At the CCP’s Sixth Congress held in Moscow, Li Lisan was elected the general secretary of the Party. Under the new leadership, the CCP became a branch of the Comintern and Li used his connection with Moscow to strengthen his own position in the CCP and the Jiangxi Soviet Republic.
In 1929, Li Lisan felt encouraged by the financial crisis in Western countries and disunity of the Nanjing government under the GMD. As the general secretary of the CCP, he predicted the arrival of a high tide in the Chinese revolution and advocated a shift of strategic focus from rural areas back to the cities. At the same time, he became increasingly impatient with what he saw as the “rightist opportunism” in the CCP that was manifested by an excessive interest in the peasantry and guerrilla warfare in rural areas. Out of his orthodox Marxist belief, Li distrusted peasants and saw them as “petty bourgeoisie” who were opportunistic by nature and therefore unable to assume the task of the Chinese revolution. He believed that a proletarian revolution had to be carried out by the working class.
Following the policy of the Comintern, Li urged his party to instigate armed uprisings in urban areas, regardless of China s social and economic conditions. Workers' uprisings, Li insisted, marked the «maturity of the revolutionary movement.M At a meeting of the Politburo of the CCP in June 1930, Li pushed through a resolution that demanded military actions for the victory of the Chinese revolution in several important provinces and industrial centers. Under his leadership, the small and poor-equipped Chinese Red Army came out of its rural bases in an attempt to seize some cities in central China.
Ironically, neither Li Lisan nor the Comintern behind him had a well-defined strategy for the campaigns. Blind leadership at the top of the CCP inevitably led to military disasters. The campaigns in the summer of 1930 failed miserably. Luckily for the Red Army, its leaders like Zhu De and Mao Zedong were not totally under Li's control and pulled their troops back in time to avoid total annihilation. The ill-fated military campaigns ended Li5s leadership in the CCP. In November 1930, he was stripped of all his positions in the Central Committee of the Party and at the top of the Jiangxi Soviet Republic. All his allies in the CCP fell from power with him. His brief dominance of the Chinese revolution is often known as the Li Lisan Line, which is equivalent to revolutionary dogmatism.
Mao Zedong, who rivaled Li Lisan for leadership in the CCP in 1930, called Li’s strategic plan as an “illusory story.” To Mao, armed struggle the countryside remained the most sensible strategy for the Red Army and the CCP. He urged his party to focus on the rural area and to seize small urban areas only when conditions were ripe.
After his fall from power, Li Lisan went into semiretirement between 1931 and 1946 in the Soviet Union. After returning to China in 1946, he first worked in the northeast region during the civil war. After the founding of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, he served successively as the vice-president of the All China Workers Federation, Minister of Labor, General Secretary of the CCP5s North China Regional Bureau, and so on.
Li died in June 1967, during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.