Chen Duxiu

Chen Duxiu or Ch’en Tu-hsiu (1879-1942), Chinese political leader who led the Chinese Communist Party from its founding in 1921 until 1927. Born to a wealthy family in Anhui Province in eastern China, Chen studied in Japan in 1902 and 1903 and helped found radical Chinese political societies there.

After returning to China in 1903 he established revolutionary newspapers. Po Wenwai, the military governor of Anhui province, appointed Chen provincial education commissioner in 1912. When Po was ousted by Chinese president Yuan Shikai in 1913, Chen fled to Japan. He returned to China in 1915 and started the journal Youth Magazine (renamed New Youth the following year). It soon became the most influential periodical in China and, in 1917, Cai Yuanpei, the chancellor of Beijing University, appointed Chen dean of the College of Letters. There he became a leading intellectual in the May Fourth Movement of 1919 when Chinese intellectuals, influenced by studies in the West, called for cultural change. Chen advocated rejection of traditional values and thought, and the adoption of Western ideas about science, democracy, equality, and human rights. He was arrested during the demonstrations on May 4, 1919, and spent three months in jail for distributing inflammatory literature.

In 1920 Chen moved to Shanghai and founded the Socialist Youth League. Serving briefly as the head of education for Guangdong province in southern China, Chen was unable to attend the founding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in Shanghai in 1921. Nonetheless, the founding members elected Chen in absentia to the CCP’s top post and he returned to Shanghai. He remained head of the CCP until 1927. In 1930 Chen was expelled from the CCP after criticizing the party for putting the interests of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) above those of China, and in 1932 he was arrested by the Kuomintang (Nationalist government) and sentenced to 15 years in prison. Chen was released in a general amnesty when the Japanese invaded China in 1937, and lived out the rest of his life with little power or influence.