Chen Duxiu

General-secretary and chair of the Chinese Communist Party (1921-1927)

• Born: October 8, 1879
• Birthplace: Huaining (now Anqing), Anhui Province, China
• Died: May 27, 1942
• Place of death: Jiangjin, Sichuan Province, China

As the editor of a groundbreaking literary journal and dean of arts and letters at Beijing University, Chen Duxiu was a central figure in the Chinese “literary renaissance” of 1915-1921 and in the May Fourth Movement of 1919. He founded the Chinese Communist Party with Li Dazhao in 1921 and served as its first general-secretary and its chair.

Early Life

The formative years in the life of Chen Duxiu (tsehn dew-zhyew) spanned a time of great political, social, and intellectual ferment in the last decades of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912). Foreign incursion, official corruption, and belated attempts at “self-strengthening” and reform impressed the young Chen with the need for China to become a cohesive and powerful nation-state. To a remarkable degree, his life was a continual quest for the best method of effecting this change.

Chen was born to a modest gentry family in China’s northern Anhui Province. His father, who died when Chen was two, had served as an officer in Manchuria, and the Chen family reportedly boasted ties to the powerful official Li Hongzhang (Li Hung-chang). Following the practice of ambitious Chinese families, Duxiu and his brother Mengji were provided with a rigorous classical education in preparation for the examinations to qualify for government service.

At the precocious age of seventeen, Chen passed the initial test but in 1897 failed to obtain the provincial or juren degree. He was free to try again, but this setback coincided with the aftermath of the humiliating war with Japan (1894-1895) and the European “race for concessions,” and Chen, like many of China’s young literati, now sought Western learning as a key to China’s salvation. Though the reform movement of Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao was quashed in the September, 1898, coup d’état of Empress Dowager Cixi (Ts’u Hsi), their attempted synthesis of Confucian and Western ideas would provide an important model for Chen’s thinking for most of the next decade.

During the next five years, Chen studied English, French, and various technical subjects at a school in Hangzhou and rounded out his basic studies at the Tokyo Higher Normal School. During this period, he formed the basis of his beliefs in vernacular language as a tool of reform and the need for China to be reconstituted by revolution. He also acquired a taste for the bohemian habits of Chinese expatriate intellectuals, indulging in frequent bouts of drinking and womanizing. Chen’s revolutionary activities at this point consisted of little more than flirting with romantic anarchism. Yet his literary accomplishments were considerably more advanced. In 1904, he founded the Anhui suhua bao (Anhui common-speech journal), one of the first vernacular publications in China.

In 1906, he again left for Japan and briefly studied at the University of Waseda. There he came into contact with members of Sun Yat-sen’s (Sun Yixian) Kuomintang (Guomindang). While generally enthusiastic about Sun’s program, Chen’s intellectual independence would not allow him to accept the alliance’s call for the suppression of the Manchus. In a pattern that was to repeat itself in later life, Chen maintained ties to the revolutionaries but refused to be subject to their discipline.

Life’s Work

Following the abdication of the Qing in 1912, Chen’s ties to the revolutionary government and his reputation as a scholar and editor secured him a position as head of the Anhui Department of Education. Within a year, however, General Yuan Shikai, now president of the republic, moved against his parliamentary opposition, and Chen and his patron, Anhui governor Bo Wenwei, fled to Japan. Following a brief stint as an editor of the opposition Tiger Magazine there, Chen moved to foreign controlled Shanghai, where he founded Qingnian zazhi (youth magazine) in September, 1915.

Though the immediate reason for the founding of Qingnian zazhi or La Jeunesse, as it was rendered by the Francophile Chen was to oppose Yuan Shikai’s efforts to start a new imperial dynasty, it soon became a vehicle for articulating ideas on social reform. For Chen, the youth of a nation represented its potential for renewal and progress. In the West, he believed, the movements toward democracy and emancipation had drawn their impetus from this source. In China, however, the weight of the past slowed the progress of the nation in innumerable ways.

An ancient language was accessible to only a fraction of the population, keeping the people from reaping the fruits of their past, and draining the time and energy of the few who could master it. The language ensured that Scholasticism rather than science would predominate in Chinese thought. Finally, that language robbed the nation’s youth of the independence of mind and will needed to remake the nation and culture in their own image. Instead it burdened them with a cult of age and a slavish worship of ancient learning.

Perhaps the most direct expression of Chen’s iconoclasm may be found in his “Call to Youth” of 1915. Drawing liberally from such diverse thinkers as Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Leo Tolstoy, and Rabindranath Tagore, as well as the Chinese classics, he demanded that China’s youth, “Be independent, not servile . . . progressive, not conservative . . . aggressive, not retiring . . . cosmopolitan, not isolationist . . . utilitarian, not formalistic . . . [and] scientific, not imaginative.” Chen’s articles extolled Western pragmatism and democratic values as embodied in his characters “Mr. Science” and “Mr. Democracy,” and his attacks on Confucianism grew increasingly pointed.

In 1917, Chen received an appointment as dean of arts and letters at the University of Beijing, which had become a center for politically active scholars. Under Chen’s patronage, Xin qingnian (new youth), as the journal was now called, ran articles by Beijing professors Hu Shi, Qian Xuantong, and Li Dazhao that were written in vernacular Chinese. The prestige and eclecticism of its contributors made Xin qingnian the most important publication of this Chinese “literary renaissance.” Increasingly, however, the articles addressed political subjects.

In the wake of Yuan Shikai’s death in 1916, China lapsed into a state of incessant warfare by competing warlord factions, which was exacerbated by the Japanese. The hopes of China’s intellectuals had been kindled by the end of World War I in Europe, the Russian revolutions, and the idealism of U.S. president Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points. Chinese delegates to the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919 had expected to regain the Japanese-occupied province of Shandong and hoped to modify relations with the Western powers. Instead, on May 4, 1919, it was revealed that Japan would be allowed to keep Shandong. The news caused widespread student demonstrations that rapidly grew into a nationwide anti-Japanese boycott. Chen, as an active supporter of the students, was briefly arrested by the Beijing government. He soon despaired of the West providing any real help to China and became increasingly attracted to Marxism and the Bolshevik experiment in Russia. Through Li Dazhao, his Marxist study group was approached by Comintern, and a provisional central committee formed in May, 1920. The following year, a national party was founded, with Chen as its general-secretary.

Chen soon found himself at odds with Comintern direction of the party. In 1923, the Chinese Communist Party , with Chen now as its chair, was directed to form a united front with Sun Yat-sen and join his Kuomintang (nationalist party) to unite China by force of arms and move the country into the “bourgeois-democratic” stage of development. Chen, however, considered this to be a costly abdication of his party’s role as the vanguard of workers and peasants. The death of Sun in March, 1925, and the splintering of the Kuomintang into right and left factions contributed to Chen’s misgivings about Comintern’s long-term strategy in China.

The telling blow came in the wake of Chiang Kai-shek’s “White Terror” against the Communists. After consolidating Kuomintang control of South China and the Yangtze Valley in the spring of 1927, Chiang launched a six-month purge that decimated the newly strengthened party. A series of ill-conceived uprisings, belatedly ordered by Comintern, culminated in wholesale massacre. A small remnant of the party escaped under the leadership of Mao Zedong and established a base in remote Jiangxi Province. Other survivors, including Chen, settled in Shanghai, where they faced the prospect of extradition by the foreign authorities.

Chen excoriated the Central Committee and Comintern for the disaster in 1927 and, after being censured for his activities, was expelled from the party on June 11, 1930. At about this time, Chen, who had been attracted to Leon Trotsky’s ideas of compressing the stages of development leading to socialism and of the need for the proletariat to take the leading role over the peasants, became a full convert to Trotskyism. While struggling to establish his faction, however, he was arrested, tried by the Nationalists, and sentenced to fifteen years in prison in 1933.

The four years Chen served in prison were devoted largely to researches into the origins of the classical written language and its relationship to the vernacular. Because he was still considered one of the nation’s premier intellectuals, he was accorded lenient treatment and allowed books and visitors. The Second United Front between the Kuomintang and the Communists and the war with Japan in 1937 brought Chen’s release, but he remained a center of controversy. Though still highly critical of the Nationalists, he was accused by each side of secretly aiding the other, and even of being in the pay of the Japanese. In 1938, he retreated to China’s wartime capital of Chongqing, eventually settling in the village of Jiangjin. There, his health declining and the nation’s fortunes again at a low ebb, he died on May 27, 1942.

Significance

Chen’s life embodied nearly all of the intellectual and cultural movements experienced by China in the twentieth century, and he is still considered a controversial figure in both China and the West. The nature of his iconoclastic approach to literature and his condemnation of Confucianism as a sterile orthodoxy has perplexed scholars as to whether his main influences were heterodox classical Chinese thinkers or Westerners. The exact provenance of his conversion to Marxism is obscured by his penchant for sampling widely from diverse ideologies. His importance as a catalyst and as an organizer is indisputable, yet his determination to go in his own direction continually separated him from potential allies and mainstream party members. Perhaps his significance was best expressed by Mao, who called him simply the “commander in chief” of the May Fourth Movement.

Chen’s last writings, Chen Duxiu zui hou dui yu min zhu zheng zhi di jian jie (Chen Duxiu’s last opinions on democratic government), issued posthumously in 1950, complete the intellectual circle that began at the turn of the last century. Divorcing himself from Leninism as well as Trotskyism, he raised questions about the relationship of political freedom and economics and about the limitations of totalitarianism as a moral system that would have tremendous relevance for China in subsequent decades. In the process, he groped back to a faith in political pluralism and science and democracy, tempered by economic justice. To the end, he railed at enforced orthodoxy of any kind, whether Confucian or Marxist.

Bibliography

Bailey, Paul J. China in the Twentieth Century. 2d ed. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2001. This overview of Chinese history contains numerous references to Chen and his historical significance.

Feigon, Lee. Chen Duxiu: Founder of the Chinese Communist Party. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983. Utilizing materials previously unavailable to scholars, Feigon’s work deftly traces the complicated evolution of Chen’s ideas to Marxism and Trotskyism. Particularly valuable are his explorations of Chen’s early vernacular writings.

Kuo, Thomas C. Ch’en Tu-hsiu (1879-1942) and the Chinese Communist Movement. South Orange, N.J.: Seton Hall University Press, 1975. Pioneering monographic treatment of Chen’s intellectual progress toward Marxism and the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. Kuo lays great stress on developing a contextual foundation by means of examining Chen’s personal experiences.

Lescot, Partrick. Before Mao: The Untold Story of Li Lisan and the Creation of Communist China. Translated by Steven Rendall. New York: Ecco, 2004. This biography of one of the founders of the Chinese Communist Party includes information about Chen.

Meisner, Maurice. Li Ta-ch’ao and the Origins of Chinese Marxism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967. This book remains a classic in the field of Chinese Communist intellectual history by one of the most respected scholars in the field. Provides an excellent complement to any study of Chen and contains abundant material on the interplay of his ideas with those of Li.

Sheridan, James E. China in Disintegration: The Republican Era in Chinese History, 1912-1949. New York: Free Press, 1975. The standard text on the republican period in China. The chapter on the new literature and the May Fourth Movement provides succinct accounts of Chen’s role in the founding of the literary movement and the Chinese Communist Party.

Zhou, Cezong. The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China. 1960. New ed. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1970. In terms of scholarship and accessibility to general students, this remains the standard work on the May Fourth Movement. It contains extensive background material on Chen as well as a number of other intellectuals involved in the Chinese literary renaissance.