Chen Duxiu

Early Life and Intellectual Formation

Chen Duxiu was born on 9 October 1879 in Anqing, Anhui Province, into a gentry family. He passed the first level of the imperial examination but was increasingly drawn to Western thought and Japanese reformist ideas during study trips to Japan in 1901–02 and 1906–07. Returning to China with exposure to Meiji Japan's rapid modernisation, he concluded that China's regeneration required abandoning not only the Qing dynasty but the entire Confucian cultural framework that had shaped Chinese civilisation for two millennia.

New Youth and the New Culture Movement

In September 1915, Chen founded New Youth (新青年, Xin Qingnian) magazine in Shanghai — the most influential intellectual journal of early twentieth-century China. His opening manifesto, "A Call to Youth," demanded that Chinese youth be independent, progressive, aggressive, cosmopolitan, utilitarian, and scientific, explicitly contrasting these values with Confucian hierarchy and passivity. The magazine became the central platform of the New Culture Movement, publishing essays by Hu Shi on literary reform, Lu Xun's early fiction, and Li Dazhao's introductions to Marxism.

In 1917, Chen was appointed Dean of the School of Letters at Peking University by its reforming president Cai Yuanpei. Peking University under Cai and Chen became the intellectual centre of Chinese radicalism. Chen's public advocacy of "Mr Science" and "Mr Democracy" (德先生与赛先生) as China's two essential imports from the West defined the cultural agenda of the May Fourth era. He argued with increasing urgency that China could not modernise while preserving Confucian family structures, gender inequality, and classical literary forms.

May Fourth Movement (1919)

Chen was among the most prominent intellectual supporters of the May Fourth student demonstrations. Following the arrests of students in June 1919, he personally distributed a manifesto in Beijing's commercial district calling for sustained popular resistance, was arrested by Beijing authorities, and spent three months in prison. The imprisonment radicalized him further: he emerged convinced that cultural reform alone was insufficient and that organised political action — and ultimately revolution — was necessary.

Co-founding the Chinese Communist Party (1921)

Chen's reading of Marxist theory, facilitated by Li Dazhao's articles in New Youth and contact with Comintern representative Grigori Voitinsky, led him toward Communism by 1920. In July 1921, he became the first General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party at its founding congress in Shanghai, though he was not present — he was in Guangzhou serving as Education Commissioner. He led the party through its early years of organisation among urban workers and its uneasy alliance with Sun Yat-sen's Nationalist Party (the First United Front, 1923–1927).

Leadership Crisis and Expulsion

The catastrophic collapse of the First United Front in April 1927 — when Chiang Kai-shek launched the Shanghai Massacre, killing thousands of Communists and trade unionists — destroyed the party's urban base and discredited Chen's strategy of collaboration with the KMT. The Comintern, seeking to deflect blame from its own directives, held Chen primarily responsible. He was removed as General Secretary in July 1927 and formally expelled from the CCP in 1929 after he aligned with the Left Opposition (Trotskyists), criticising Stalin's China policy.

Later Years: Trotskyism and Imprisonment

Through the 1930s Chen developed an independent Trotskyist analysis of Chinese politics, arguing that the CCP's strategy of peasant revolution under Comintern direction had abandoned Marxist class analysis. He was arrested by the Nationalist government in 1932 and sentenced to thirteen years in prison for "endangering the Republic," serving five years before his release in 1937 following the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War. His remaining years were spent in poverty in Sichuan, writing linguistic studies and political commentary. He died on 27 May 1942 in Jiangjin County, aged 62.

Legacy

Chen Duxiu's place in Chinese history is among the most contested. In PRC historiography, he was long condemned as a "right opportunist" whose errors caused the 1927 disaster; limited rehabilitation began only in the 1980s. His foundational role in launching the New Culture Movement and co-founding the CCP is acknowledged, but his later Trotskyism and criticism of Stalinist Comintern policy made full rehabilitation politically inconvenient. Outside China, he is increasingly recognised as one of the most original Chinese political thinkers of the twentieth century — a man whose intellectual trajectory from Confucian reform through liberal modernism to Marxism and finally independent socialist critique mirrored the impossible choices facing Chinese intellectuals in a century of crisis.