Chen Duxiu 陈独秀
Chen Duxiu 陈独秀 (1880-1942) with a courtesy name Zhongpu, a native of Huaining County, Anhui Province, was a famous modern scholar and politician, an activist of the May 4th Movement of 1919, and one of the main founders of the Communist Party of China (CPC).
Chen took part in and passed the county-level imperial examination and succeeded in the provincial-level examination the following year. He later went to Japan for further study.
In 1904, he established the influential periodical “Anhui Colloquial News”. In 1915, he chiefly edited the magazine Youth (renamed as New Youth the next year), which started the prelude of New Culture Campaign.
Chen joined the faculty of Peking University in 1917 as the university’s dean to take charge of the science and arts, where he published “Theories of Literary Revolution,” calling for young generation to struggle against Confucianism. In 1918, he initiated the magazine of Weekly Review with Li Dazhao. Since then, he directly devoted himself to the struggle of patriotic movement. Chen used New Youth to promote science, democracy and modern literature, and to discourage the study of paleography and classical Chinese literature. The magazine began to advocate the use of the scientific method and logical arguments towards the achievement of political, economic, social, ethical, and democratic goals.
In August of 1920, Chen Duxiu took the lead in Shanghai to set up a communist group, at the same time, initiating the formation of the Communist Party of China. From the first session to the fifth session of the national congress of CPC, he was elected the head of communist party. During the late period of the first domestic revolution war, the CPC Central Committee represented by Chen Duxiu committed serious rightist mistake of neglecting rightist errors of contesting with the bourgeois for leadership under the erroneous guidance of Comintern, resulting in the tragic failure of the Great Revolution. At the August Seventh meeting of CPC in 1927, Chen Duxiu was dismissed from his post. In 1929 he was expelled from the Party. In October 1932, he was arrested by Kuomintang and was set free in 1937. In 1942, he died of illness and left a book of The Articles of Duxiu.
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