Li Dazhao

Early Life and Education

Li Dazhao was born on 29 October 1889 in乐亭 (Laoting) County, Hebei Province, into a poor farming family. Orphaned in infancy, he was raised by his grandfather. He displayed exceptional academic ability and won a scholarship to Beiyang University in Tianjin in 1907, later transferring to Waseda University in Tokyo in 1913, where he studied political economy. His years in Japan coincided with intense Chinese student political activity; he witnessed the Chinese student protests against Japan's Twenty-One Demands in 1915 and returned to China in 1916 radicalized by the experience of national humiliation abroad.

Peking University and the New Culture Movement

In 1918, Li was appointed chief librarian of Peking University and shortly afterwards professor in the Department of Economics and History — rare dual appointments that gave him both institutional standing and daily contact with students. Under Cai Yuanpei's pluralistic presidency, he used his position to build one of the most intellectually fertile environments in modern Chinese history. He was one of the first Chinese intellectuals to engage seriously with Marxist theory, publishing "My Marxist Views" (我的马克思主义观) in New Youth in 1919 — the most systematic introduction to Marx yet to appear in Chinese.

His interpretation of Marxism was distinctive: where orthodox Marxism located the revolutionary subject in the urban proletariat, Li was drawn to the revolutionary potential of the peasantry and to the national question — China as a colonised, semi-peripheral nation exploited by international capital. This synthesis of Marxism with Chinese nationalism and agrarian populism would prove enormously influential on the generation of revolutionaries who followed, including Mao Zedong, who worked under Li as a library assistant in 1918–19.

The Russian Revolution and May Fourth

The Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 transformed Li Dazhao's intellectual world. He published two landmark essays — "The Victory of Bolshevism" (布尔什维主义的胜利, November 1918) and "The Victory of the Common People" (庶民的胜利) — hailing the revolution as proof that a poor, agrarian country could break the chains of imperialism through organised mass action. These essays, arriving just as China's Paris Peace Conference humiliation was unfolding, made Bolshevism seem directly relevant to China's situation.

During the May Fourth demonstrations of 1919, Li was among the senior faculty who defended the arrested students and called for their release. His Marxist study group at Peking University — the Society for the Study of Marxist Theory (马克思学说研究会), founded in 1920 — became one of the key seedbeds of Chinese Communism, attracting students who would later become founding members of the CCP.

Co-founding the Chinese Communist Party

Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu are jointly credited as the intellectual co-founders of the Chinese Communist Party, though their roles differed: Chen was the organisational leader who became first General Secretary, while Li built the northern intellectual network that produced many of the party's founding members. When the CCP was formally established in Shanghai in July 1921, Li was not present — he was in Beijing — but the Peking University network he had cultivated formed a significant portion of the party's early membership. He led the CCP's Beijing branch throughout the early 1920s.

The First United Front and Arrest

Li Dazhao was a strong advocate of the First United Front with the Nationalist Party (1923–1927), arguing that Chinese Communists should join the KMT as individuals to build the mass movement capable of national liberation. He participated in several KMT congresses as a CCP member and worked to build the party's northern base. When Chiang Kai-shek launched his anti-Communist purge in April 1927, Li was already in danger: he had taken refuge in the Soviet Embassy compound in Beijing, which warlord Zhang Zuolin's forces — acting against the foreign legation conventions — raided on 6 April 1927, arresting Li and dozens of other Communists. He was executed by strangulation on 28 April 1927, aged 37.

Legacy

Li Dazhao's death made him a martyr of the Chinese Communist revolution. In PRC historiography he is honoured as one of the "two great founders" (两大创始人) of the CCP alongside Chen Duxiu — though Chen's later expulsion from the party complicates that pairing. Li's intellectual contribution was twofold: he was the conduit through which Marxism entered Chinese academic life as a serious theoretical framework, and he adapted that framework to China's agrarian and nationalist realities in ways that would prove more durable than the urban-proletarian orthodoxy of the Comintern. His student Mao Zedong would develop these adaptations into the theoretical foundation of the Communist revolution.