Chen Duxiu, Founder of the Chinese Communist Party

by Lee Feigon

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691640952
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	04/19/2016
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #450
Pages:	302
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.30(h) x 0.90(d)

Read an Excerpt

Chen Duxiu

Founder of the Chinese Communist Party

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By Lee Feigon

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1983 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-05393-6

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CHAPTER 1

PERSPECTIVES ON CHEN DUXIU

The year 1879 marked the birth of two men who would exercise enormous influence over the shape of modern history, Leon Bronstein in Russia and Chen Duxiu in China. Acutely aware of the "backwardness" of their homelands in relation to the advanced industrial states of Western Europe, both men would be concerned with the adaptation of Marxism under these conditions and would play seminal roles in the establishment of the Communist parties of their respective countries. Furthermore, Leon Bronstein and Chen Duxiu would both be identified with the cosmopolitan or internationalist wings of their parties in an era in which "socialism in one country" came to be a Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy. The two were finally expelled from the parties they had helped establish and both were vilified by their former comrades. Yet despite their shared birth year and similar historical roles, these two figures differed greatly in their eventual fame.

The revolutionary theories and actions of Leon Bronstein, later known as Trotsky, created profound controversy and continue to excite interest to this day, not only in the Soviet Union but in the entire world. Chen Duxiu has rarely been credited for his ideas and activities in China or in the West, even though his contributions to the Chinese Revolution were of at least equal importance. Indeed, his influence cannot be understated: with the possible exception of Mao Zedong, it would be hard to find someone whose ideas and actions have had greater consequences for modern Chinese history than Chen Duxiu. His contributions included everything from the introduction of punctuation in Chinese writing to the establishment of the Chinese Communist party. He helped to guide the Republican revolution that overthrew the Qing dynasty in 1911, he was the major leader of the New Culture movement between 1915 and 1919, and he served as the first secretary-general of the Chinese Communist party. Still, Chen Duxiu was pushed into a political no man's land. Rejected by those with whom he had worked most closely, he died in obscurity. The Chinese Communists hounded him out of the very party he had helped found — ironically, for his Trotskyist beliefs — in 1929, condemning him as an "opportunist" and "renegade." On the other side, the Chinese Nationalist regime, which once touted Chen's late-in-life reconversion to the principles of democracy, still shuns him not only for his Communist activities but also for his earlier role as a zealous opponent of Chinese tradition.

Trotsky also is considered a nonperson today by the Russian Communist party that he once led. Within the Soviet Union all references to his name and deeds have been removed from the official history of the Bolshevik Revolution. But Trotsky before his fall was a successful revolutionary who helped create one of the major upheavals of this century. Thus Trotsky's actions, even after his exile from the land of his birth, drew headlines throughout the world. Chen, by way of contrast, was a revolutionary failure. After 1927 his name was mentioned even less outside of China than inside the country.

But Chen's failure to lead a successful revolution is only a partial reason for the lack of attention that has been paid to Chen outside of China. Unlike Trotsky, whose revolutionary ideals were formed in no small part because of his alienation from the mainstream of Russian society, Chen's revolutionary goals were largely a product of his immersion in Chinese society.

One of the major points of this study is that although Chen was known for his relentless attacks on Chinese tradition, his success as a revolutionary was achieved precisely because of his ability to manipulate the tradition he was attacking. This is not surprising. Unlike most well-known foreign revolutionaries such as Trotsky or the generation of Chinese revolutionaries that followed Chen Duxiu, Chen and the Chinese of his generation were absorbed in the traditions of their society. As Maurice Meisner has put it: "... the very intensity of his assault on traditional values and his strident calls for Westernization reflected the influence that those values once exerted on him."

Chen's reliance on Chinese tradition at the same time as he was attacking it has not been very well understood by most who have studied Chen. The failure to understand this point has affected our understanding of the entire period of history that Chen influenced. A prime example of this can be seen in the common scholarly view of Chen's role in the New Culture movement, when Chen led a withering attack on virtually all aspects of Chinese tradition. Ironically, this aspect of Chen's life that has been explored the most has been understood the least.

Most studies of the New Culture movement period have failed to ask why Chen's critique of many features of the traditional society were so persuasive to a generation of people who grew up in that tradition. Assuming the appeal of Western values, these studies have been content with taking Chen's attacks on the old culture at face value, identifying Chen as an all-out Westernizer who advocated science and democracy as the solution to China's woes. Benjamin Schwartz, writing in his pioneering study of Chen in 1951, called Chen "a man deeply involved in the situation of his country who has jettisoned traditional Chinese solutions and is anxiously looking Westward for new solutions. ... Chen's avowed aim is to eliminate the traditional Chinese pattern of life and thought and to substitute a modern, Western pattern of life and thought." This dislike for his own tradition, Schwartz asserted, led Chen to distrust narrow patriotic sentiment because he, "like many European liberals," regarded it as an anachronism, one which was apt to lead to the exaltation of "nationalism." Since 1951, Western historians of China have been virtually unanimous in their agreement with Schwartz's description of Chen. Indeed, it has become axiomatic to assert that during the period from 1915 to 1921, Chen was the key representative, or at least a major proponent, of Western "liberal" values. Moreover, most would agree with Schwartz's contention that Chen represented international or cosmopolitan tendencies during an era characterized by its vehement nationalism.

To be sure, Professor Lin Yu-sheng has recently attempted to show what he calls the "cultural intellectualist" assumptions of Confucianism in what he sees as Chen's insistence on the priority of intellectual over social change prior to 1921. Still, even Professor Lin agrees that Chen was a radical iconoclast who was interested in the introduction of Western ideas into China.

Most Chinese Communist writers have likewise viewed Chen Duxiu's role during the initial stages of the May Fourth period as that of a cosmopolitan intellectual interested in introducing Western bourgeois ideas of "science and democracy" into China during the so-called "bourgeois-democratic" phase of the Chinese Revolution. To be sure, not all Chinese Communist authors have felt Chen's legacy from this period to be a positive one. Ever since Chen's expulsion from the party in 1929, most Chinese Marxist historians have been very uneasy about just how to assess Chen's obviously massive contributions to the early years of the Chinese Revolution. This was most apparent during the years of the Cultural Revolution in the late sixties, when it was claimed that "every pore on Chen Duxiu's body was stained with the blood of the people." During this time those who had previously implied in writing or even sometimes in conversations that "Chen had made some positive contributions during the May Fourth period" were criticized, and "some were even expelled from the party for this reason."

This harsh assessment of Chen's activities prior to 1919 has been generally repudiated in China since 1976. An article in the Liberation Daily in 1979 attempted to sum up the attitude toward Chen: "It was Chen Duxiu who criticized the old feudal ethic, propagated the new thought, and founded the literary revolution. He was the most influential leader and 'bright star' of intellectual circles during the May Fourth period." With cosmopolitanism again in vogue and with an interest in Western ideas and technology once more fashionable in China, the party has again begun to evaluate positively what it considers to be Chen's earlier role in popularizing Western ideas in China.

But if Chinese historians of Chen's New Culture movement activities would appear to have again shifted to a generally sympathetic view of his supposed role in Westernizing Chinese thought, their Soviet counterparts are still skeptical. Not surprisingly, Russian historians do not tend to be impressed by what others see as Chen's fascination with Western bourgeois democratic ideas and institutions. Soviet historians tend to stress the period after 1919 when Chen came under the influence of the Bolshevik Revolution and became one of the first in China to advocate proletarian revolution. Indeed, at least one recent study of the May Fourth period has suggested a persistence of Confucian ideas in the literature of the New Culture movement that began in 1915 with Chen's publication of Youth, or New Youth, magazine.

Although this approach might seem novel, a recent Japanese study by Matsumoto Hideki has gone even further in the same direction. To be sure, Matsumoto, like most Western and Chinese writers, sees Chen as engaged in transforming the spiritual consciousness of Chinese youth by attempting to "elevate European and American ideas of science and democracy" within China. But Matsumoto traces the primary distinctions raised by Chen in carrying out this goal to the ideas of earlier, more traditional Chinese scholars. In particular, Matsumoto traces Chen's ideas to his youthful association with Zhang Binglin, the great Confucian scholar who in the pre-1911 period was a revolutionary associate of Chen Duxiu.

Although most have taken for granted the radicalism of Chen's ideas, Matsumoto asserts that both Chen and Zhang shared a "scholar-gentry (shi dafu) consciousness" that underlay what he calls the "conservatism" of many of Chen's positions. Matsumoto does not really explain why he feels that Chen and Zhang had a "scholar-gentry consciousness" or why he would characterize some of Chen's ideas as conservative, but he does suggest that although Chen and Zhang end up on opposite sides during the Republican period, Chen may have derived from Zhang Binglin his notion of a distinctive Chinese (and European) national consciousness. For although by 1915 Chen Duxiu, like Zhang, clearly felt that Chinese culture needed to be changed, he also felt that culture could be reduced to an inherited set of values, or a "national essence."

In fact, around the turn of the century, Chen had been part of a movement led by Zhang Binglin and Liu Shipei, another scholar-radical later turned conservative, to restore China's national essence. A number of American writers have lately studied the National Essence movement, seeing it in the decade after the 1911 Revolution as a conservative "countercurrent" to the New Culture movement led by Chen Duxiu. What these writers have not noted (nor were they particularly concerned with this issue) is the similar historical footing of Chen Duxiu and the so-called conservative National Essence scholars, against whom Chen turned after 1911. For as Matsumoto points out, even after Chen broke with the members of the National Essence movement, he continued to be influenced by the ideas and values of this movement.

Many of the positions Chen took during the New Culture movement period were a result of his opposition to the proposals for the establishment of a Confucian religion by the former reform movement leaders Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao. As Matsumoto implies, Chen's anti-Confucian rhetoric owed much to the attack by National Essence movement leader Zhang Binglin on Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao, and other members of the so-called Gongyang school that began in the early 1900s. Zhang, and then a decade later Chen, vehemently disagreed with Kang's notion that Confucianism was a national religion similar to that of Christianity in the West.

This disagreement between Kang and Zhang (which was later joined by Chen Duxiu) was in many ways a continuation of a discussion that had been going on for several centuries between the followers of the so-called New Text movement, represented in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by Kang Youwei and his followers, and the adherents of the Old Text movement, represented in modern times by Zhang Binglin. The Old Text adherents, who pioneered the kaozheng or evidential method of scholarship, desired to return to what they considered to be the authentic Confucian tradition; in the process they managed to demolish many of the neo-Confucian orthodoxies that had been taken for granted in China since at least the Song dynasty (960–1279). The Old Text adherents were particularly opposed to what they felt to be the metaphysical assumptions of the neo-Confucian doctrine, seeing them as adulterations introduced into Confucian doctrine as a consequence of Buddhist influence. Old Text scholars pioneered a more critical and rational view of Confucian tradition as well as rigorous standards of scholarship that may have made it easier for later Chinese to accept Western democratic and scientific ideas critical of the traditional Confucian orthodoxy.

Certainly, the critiques of the Old Text proponents influenced their New Text opponents and vice versa. A shared sense of values was evident in the twentieth century when both sides sometimes joined forces in their opposition to the problems posed for China by Western imperialism. Both Chen Duxiu and Zhang Binglin, for instance, were at one time followers of their later enemy Kang Youwei. It is therefore not surprising that in attacking Confucianism, Chen Duxiu often took for granted the definitions of Confucianism put forward by his opponents. As Matsumoto asserts, Chen's later attacks on Confucian ritual as inseparable from the Confucian tradition showed the influence of Liang Qichao, who in his Confucian writings emphasized the stress on rites of Confucius's disciple Xun Zi.

Matsumoto's demonstration of Chen's indebtedness to Liang Qichao and Zhang Binglin suggests an interesting avenue of inquiry. The writings of Japanese writers such as Matsumoto, along with the ideas of the Soviet historians mentioned above, provide an important supplement to the works of Western scholars who have recently studied long-ignored conservative Chinese figures such as Zhang Binglin, Liu Shipei, and Liang Shuming. Taken together the studies of these recent historians make it clear that the relationship of Chen Duxiu (and by association the entire New Culture movement) to his tradition and to Western ideas is far more complicated than past historians have suggested. Placed within this context, many of the stereotypes about Chen disappear.

Chen was not simply a Westernized intellectual. Contrary to most previous Chinese and Western biographers of Chen, I maintain that during the period in which he edited the journal New Youth, the major focus for the New Culture movement, Chen in fact was an ardent nationalist whose seeming cosmopolitanism was skin-deep at best. But Chen opposed those nationalist proposals that he felt would not preserve what he deemed the true essence of the Chinese nation. Similarly, he advocated Western ideas that he felt could help to retain a real Chinese essence. The ideas of "science and democracy," which Chen is often credited with introducing or at least popularizing in China, were already prevalent by the time that Chen began the New Culture movement. In fact, such notions were originally introduced by the very people Chen attacked in his New Youth writings for having perverted these ideas — Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao, and their followers. (Attacking people for betraying their own ideals was to become a common trait in Chinese Communist history.) Chen retained the Old Text movement's antipathy to Kang's proposals for a Confucian religion. Additionally, he felt that Kang's attempt to show the compatibility between Confucianism and "science and democracy" would result in a negation of Western ideas. Like Zhang Binglin and other Old Text scholars, Chen felt that the proposals of his opponents, especially Kang Youwei, were incompatible with the true needs and ideals of the Chinese people and nation.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Chen Duxiu by Lee Feigon. Copyright © 1983 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• CONTENTS, pg. vii
• ABBREVIATIONS, pg. ix
• PREFACE, pg. xi
• CHAPTER ONE. PERSPECTIVES ON CHEN DUXIU, pg. 1
• CHAPTER TWO. AWAKENING YOUTH, pg. 23
• CHAPTER THREE. REVOLUTIONARY TEACHER IN ANHUI, pg. 60
• CHAPTER FOUR. THE POLITICS OF CULTURE, pg. 96
• CHAPTER FIVE. PARTY FOUNDER CHEN DUXIU, pg. 137
• CHAPTER SIX. THE UNITED FRONT, pg. 166
• CHAPTER SEVEN. CHEN DUXIU IN OPPOSITION, pg. 196
• EPILOGUE, pg. 230
• GLOSSARY OF IMPORTANT TERMS, pg. 237
• BIBLIOGRAPHY, pg. 245
• INDEX, pg. 271