Li Dazhao
Template:Short description Template:Family name hatnote Template:Use dmy dates Template:Infobox officeholder Li Dazhao (Template:Lang-zh; 29 October 1889 – 28 April 1927) was a Chinese intellectual, revolutionary, and political activist who co-founded the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) with Chen Duxiu in 1921. He was one of the first Chinese intellectuals to publicly support Bolshevism and the October Revolution, and his writings and mentorship inspired a generation of young radicals, including Mao Zedong.
Born to a peasant family in Hebei province, Li was educated in modern schools in China and later at Waseda University in Japan. He rose to prominence during the New Culture Movement as the chief librarian and a professor of history at Peking University. In this role, he influenced many student activists and transformed his office into a hub for Marxist discussion. After the May Fourth Movement of 1919, he helped organize some of China's first communist study groups.
Li adapted Marxism to the Chinese context, emphasizing the revolutionary potential of the peasantry and developing a voluntaristic interpretation that stressed the role of conscious political action over strict economic determinism. He theorized that China, as a nation oppressed by imperialism, constituted a "proletarian nation" capable of bypassing a full capitalist stage of development. An ardent nationalist, Li was a key architect of the First United Front between the CCP and Sun Yat-sen's Kuomintang (KMT), arguing that a cross-class national revolution was necessary to defeat imperialism and warlordism.
As the political situation in northern China deteriorated, Li's focus shifted decisively to armed peasant revolt. After the Manchurian warlord Zhang Zuolin seized Beijing, Li took refuge in the Soviet embassy. In a raid on the embassy in April 1927, he was captured by Zhang's forces and executed by hanging. He is honored in CCP historiography as one of the party's founders and a principal revolutionary martyr.
Early life and education
Li Dazhao was born on 29 October 1889, in Daheituo Village, Laoting County, Hebei province.Template:Sfn His family were peasants who had accumulated enough capital through trade to become small village landlords.Template:Sfn Li was orphaned at a young age; his father died before he was born, and his mother died when he was just over a year old. He was raised by his great-uncle, Li Ruzhen, whom he called grandfather, who ensured he received a traditional education in the Confucian classics.Template:Sfn In 1899, in accordance with his grandfather's wish to secure a caretaker for him, the ten-year-old Li was married to the seventeen-year-old Zhao Renlan (Template:Zh), to whom he remained devoted for the rest of his life.Template:Sfn
In 1905, Li passed the county-level examination and enrolled in a modern middle school in Yongpingfu.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn That same year, the Qing dynasty abolished the traditional imperial examination system, closing the centuries-old path for scholars to enter the state bureaucracy. For Li's generation, a Western-style education became the preferred alternative to a classical one.Template:Sfn After graduating in 1907, he enrolled at the Peiyang College of Law and Political Science in Tianjin.Template:Sfn He studied there for six years, majoring in political economy and developing a strong desire for a life of public service and political action.Template:Sfn
During his time in Tianjin, Li was inspired by the Xinhai Revolution of 1911 but quickly grew disillusioned with the political chaos of the new Republic under Yuan Shikai.Template:Sfn He became a student leader in a local movement petitioning for constitutional reform in 1910 and joined the Chinese Socialist Party in 1912.Template:Sfn His early political thought was an uncertain mixture of Western liberal constitutional theory and traditional Confucian moral precepts, marked by a populist belief in "the people" as a unified entity whose natural freedom was threatened by the state.Template:Sfn Deeply frustrated by the corruption of the new republic, in the summer of 1913 he briefly considered retreating into a Buddhist monastic sect.Template:Sfn
Study in Japan and early nationalism
With financial assistance from the constitutionalist politician Tang Hualong, Li left for Tokyo in September 1913 to study political economy at Waseda University.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn While in Japan, he participated in student political groups opposed to Yuan Shikai's increasingly dictatorial regime in China.Template:Sfn
Li's nationalist sentiments intensified dramatically in 1915, when Japan presented its imperialistic Twenty-One Demands to the Chinese government. He became a leader among Chinese students in Japan protesting the demands, authoring a long manifesto, "A Letter of Admonition to the Elders of the Nation," that was sent to the government in Beijing.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn In these essays, Li's nationalism took on a chauvinistic tone, exalting China's traditional superiority while attributing its modern plight to foreign influence. This antiforeign sentiment was coupled with a sense of national shame, as Li argued that the Chinese themselves were responsible for their nation's weakness.Template:Sfn
During his time in Japan, Li was exposed to a wide range of Western philosophies. The thought of Henri Bergson and Ralph Waldo Emerson had a profound impact on his intellectual development.Template:Sfn In an 1915 exchange with Chen Duxiu, Li criticized what he saw as Chen's pessimism and argued, based on Bergson's concept of free will, that individuals with conscious purpose could actively shape reality.Template:Sfn Influenced by Emerson's optimistic transcendentalism, Li developed this activist philosophy into a metaphysical worldview in his 1916 essay "Spring" (Template:Zh). He presented a dialectical view of history in which the decay and death of the old inevitably contained the seeds of rebirth. He argued that China, though ancient and seemingly moribund, was on the verge of a national regeneration, a rebirth into a "young China" that would emerge from the "corpse" of its old civilization. This rebirth, he insisted, depended on the conscious actions of China's youth in the present.Template:Sfn
Armed with this philosophy, Li became impatient with his exile and eager to return to the political struggles in China. In April 1916, as Yuan Shikai's regime began to collapse, he returned to China. He was formally expelled from Waseda University for his long absence, having become deeply involved in the anti-Yuan movement.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn
Return to China and the New Culture Movement
Upon his return to China in 1916, Li briefly plunged into parliamentary politics in Beijing as an associate of Tang Hualong and the Progressive Party (Template:Zh).Template:Sfn He quickly became disillusioned with the opportunism of the politicians, who sought alliances with the dominant Peiyang warlords. He broke with the Progressive Party in October 1916, convinced that constitutional government was unworkable in the warlord era.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn By late 1917, he had concluded that China's political crisis could not be solved without a revolution.Template:Sfn
Frustrated with politics, Li was drawn to the circle of "nonpolitical" intellectuals around Chen Duxiu and the journal New Youth (Template:Zh), the leading organ of the New Culture Movement.Template:Sfn In January 1918, Li formally joined the New Youth editorial board.Template:Sfn The following month, at the invitation of Cai Yuanpei, the reformist chancellor of Peking University, Li was appointed chief librarian of the university, where Chen Duxiu was serving as dean of letters.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn In his capacity as librarian and later as a professor of history and economics, Li exerted a significant influence on student radicals. His reforms professionalized the library, making it a center for disseminating new ideas.Template:Sfn His young library assistant during the winter of 1918–1919 was Mao Zedong, whom Li introduced to Marxist thought.Template:Sfn
Conversion to Marxism
Influence of the Russian Revolution
Li Dazhao was the first major Chinese intellectual to declare his support for the October Revolution in Russia.Template:Sfn While other New Culture intellectuals, such as Chen Duxiu, welcomed the democratic February Revolution as a victory for the Allied cause in World War I, Li was skeptical of Western democracy and had little sympathy for the Allies.Template:Sfn He saw the events in Russia as a harbinger of a new wave of global revolution. In an article in July 1918, he hailed the October Revolution as a fundamental break with the past, representing a new spirit of "humanism" and internationalism that surpassed the narrow patriotism of the French Revolution.Template:Sfn
Li's interpretation was infused with his pre-Marxist philosophy of rebirth. He argued that Russia's economic backwardness was a positive advantage, providing it with "surplus energy" for radical transformation, whereas the advanced Western nations were in a state of decay.Template:Sfn This view, which bore similarities to Leon Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution, confirmed Li's own belief that China, being even more backward, was poised for a similar revolutionary leap.Template:Sfn In his highly influential article "The Victory of Bolshevism" (November 1918), he proclaimed that the Russian Revolution marked the beginning of a worldwide class war and an irresistible tide of global transformation. He declared that the age of capitalism and imperialism was coming to an end, and that "every place in the world will see the victorious flag of Bolshevism and hear the triumphal song of Bolshevism."Template:Sfn Li's response to the revolution was deeply emotional and chiliastic; he saw it as the realization of the millennium in the present, an elemental force that was transforming the entire world order.Template:Sfn
Populist ideas and "Youth and the Villages"
Following his enthusiastic embrace of Bolshevism, Li began to earnestly study Marxism. In late 1918, he organized the first Marxist study group at Peking University, which met secretly in his library office, soon known as the "Red Chamber".Template:Sfn As his messianic hopes for imminent world revolution were tempered by the political realities in Europe and China, Li began to search for concrete ways to end the social isolation of the Chinese intelligentsia. His solution was a turn to the peasantry, inspired by the example of the 19th-century Russian Populist (narodnik) movement.Template:Sfn
In a series of articles published in February 1919 under the title "Youth and the Villages", Li issued a populist call for China's young intellectuals to go to the countryside to liberate the peasantry. He argued that "China is a rural nation and most of the laboring class is made up of peasants. If they are not liberated, then our whole nation will not be liberated."Template:Sfn The urban intellectuals, he declared, had a duty to go to the villages, "unite with the laboring classes," and awaken the peasants from their political stupor. This would not only save the nation but also rescue the intellectuals themselves from the corrupting life of the cities, which he described as "the life of the devil".Template:Sfn This populist strain, with its faith in the spontaneous revolutionary energy of the peasants and its anti-urban bias, represented a significant innovation in modern Chinese revolutionary strategy and deeply influenced Li's interpretation of Marxism.Template:Sfn
Co-founder of the Chinese Communist Party
May Fourth Movement
On 1 May 1919, three days before the outbreak of the May Fourth Movement, New Youth published a special issue on Marxism edited by Li. His lengthy article, "My Marxist Views", was the most systematic and serious treatment of Marxism yet published in Chinese.Template:Sfn In it, Li presented the basic tenets of orthodox Marxist theory but also expressed his own voluntaristic inclinations. He was drawn to the theory of class struggle, which emphasized conscious political action, but expressed reservations about the economic determinism of the materialist conception of history, arguing that ethical and spiritual factors must accompany material transformation.Template:Sfn
The May Fourth protests, which erupted in Beijing in response to the decision at the Paris Peace Conference to cede German concessions in Shandong to Japan, electrified Chinese intellectuals. Li, who had long been suspicious of the Western powers, saw the decision as a confirmation of their imperialistic nature.Template:Sfn He became an influential leader of the student movement, and his library office served as a planning center for student activists.Template:Sfn According to some accounts, he personally joined the student demonstration on 4 May.Template:Sfn The movement unleashed a wave of revolutionary nationalism, political activism, and a search for "total solutions" that made socialist doctrines increasingly popular. The crisis pushed many New Culture intellectuals, including Li's colleague Chen Duxiu, to abandon their "nonpolitical" stance.Template:Sfn
"Problems and Isms" debate
In the summer of 1919, the liberal intellectual Hu Shih sparked the "Problems and Isms" debate by urging intellectuals to "More study of problems, less talk of isms." Arguing against the growing popularity of doctrines like Marxism, Hu contended that intellectuals should focus on solving individual, practical social problems through gradual, evolutionary reform.Template:Sfn Li Dazhao countered that problems could not be solved without a "fundamental solution" to the political structure as a whole. "Isms", he argued, were necessary to provide a "common direction" for a mass movement to achieve this fundamental transformation.Template:Sfn The debate was not merely a philosophical one but reflected the split between proponents of evolutionary social reform and those, like Li, who believed in political revolution.Template:Sfn In the aftermath of the debate, Li's reservations about Marxist determinism were submerged by his commitment to a revolutionary program of political action.Template:Sfn
Early organizational activities
The political ferment of the May Fourth era created fertile ground for the organization of communist groups. In early 1920, the Comintern agent Grigori Voitinsky arrived in Beijing and met with Li Dazhao.Template:Sfn Li introduced Voitinsky to Chen Duxiu, who established a communist group in Shanghai in May 1920. Li founded a parallel group in Beijing in September or October 1920.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn This arrangement established the informal leadership structure known as "Ch'en in the South, Li in the North" (Template:Zh).Template:Sfn These small groups, composed mainly of Li's and Chen's student followers, were the direct precursors of the Chinese Communist Party.Template:Sfn At the 1st National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in Shanghai in July 1921, Li was unable to attend but was represented by his student Zhang Guotao.Template:Sfn
United Front with the Kuomintang
In 1922, the Comintern formally instructed the fledgling CCP to form a "united front" with Sun Yat-sen's Kuomintang (KMT). The policy was based on the premise that the Chinese Revolution was in its "bourgeois-democratic" phase and required a cross-class alliance against imperialism. Most CCP leaders, including Chen Duxiu, initially opposed the policy.Template:Sfn Li Dazhao, however, was a principal and ardent advocate of the alliance. His nationalist-populist worldview made him predisposed to a broad national united front, and in the autumn of 1922, he became the first CCP member to join the KMT as an individual.Template:Sfn
Li played a central role in formalizing the alliance. After meeting with the Comintern agent Maring and Li in Shanghai in August 1922, Sun Yat-sen agreed to allow CCP members to join the KMT.Template:Sfn At the KMT's First National Congress in January 1924, Li reassured skeptical KMT members that the Communists were joining to support the "national revolution," not to subvert the KMT. He was elected by Sun Yat-sen to the congress presidium and to the KMT's Central Executive Committee.Template:Sfn
Li's interpretation of the alliance differed significantly from that of both the Comintern and Chen Duxiu. While Chen accepted the "bourgeois-democratic" framework and viewed the alliance as a temporary, tactical necessity before an inevitable proletarian revolution, Li saw the national revolution as a permanent, continuous process in which all Chinese people (the "proletarian nation") were centrally involved. He believed it was part of an ongoing world revolution that would merge seamlessly with the global socialist transformation.Template:Sfn His voluntaristic and nationalistic views on the revolution led him to stray far from both Leninist orthodoxy and the more deterministic views of his CCP colleagues.Template:Sfn
Later thought and peasant revolution
Li's faith in the revolutionary potential of the urban proletariat was never strong. After the brutal suppression of the Beijing–Hankou Railway strike in the February Seventh Incident of 1923, which destroyed the CCP's labor base in northern China, his attention shifted decisively to the peasantry.Template:Sfn By the end of 1925, the united front in the north had effectively collapsed due to the dominance of the KMT's right-wing "Western Hills" faction. Confronted with the failure of both the labor movement and the alliance, Li returned to the populist ideas of his 1919 writings.Template:Sfn
In his 1926 article on the Red Spear Societies, traditional peasant secret societies that were then leading revolts in northern China, Li embraced armed peasant revolt as the main engine of the Chinese revolution.Template:Sfn He argued that the peasantry, by virtue of its spontaneous military organization and class consciousness, was capable of defeating the warlords and imperialists without direction from the cities. He saw the Red Spears as the potential nuclei of a new form of political power and called on young revolutionaries to go to the villages, join these movements, and lead them "out of this vile pit onto the road of brightness."Template:Sfn His vision of a revolution based in the countryside and centered on the spontaneous power of the peasantry was a radical departure from both Comintern policy and the views of his fellow CCP leaders, and it prefigured the revolutionary strategy later developed by Mao Zedong.Template:Sfn
Arrest and execution
The political situation in Beijing deteriorated throughout 1925 and 1926. After the March 18 Massacre in 1926, in which government troops fired on protestors, a warrant was issued for Li's arrest. He took refuge in the Soviet embassy, where he continued to direct the CCP's clandestine activities in northern China.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn
On 6 April 1927, the Manchurian warlord Zhang Zuolin, who controlled Beijing, ordered a raid on the Soviet embassy with the tacit approval of the foreign diplomatic corps. Li Dazhao, his wife, his daughter, and about sixty other communists and left-wing KMT members were arrested.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn After a brief trial by a military court, Li and nineteen others were executed by strangulation on 28 April. His execution occurred just weeks after the Shanghai massacre, which marked the violent end of the First United Front and the near-destruction of the CCP.Template:Sfn
Legacy
Li Dazhao is honored by the CCP as a heroic revolutionary martyr and the "true founder" of the party.Template:Sfn While Chen Duxiu was condemned as a "right-wing opportunist" and a renegade, Li has been consistently glorified in party historiography. His voluntaristic and nationalistic interpretation of Marxism, his populist faith in the revolutionary energy of the Chinese people, and his pioneering focus on the peasantry as the main force of the revolution all became hallmarks of the ideology of Mao Zedong.Template:Sfn
Li's intellectual influence on his young library assistant, Mao Zedong, was profound. Li not only introduced Mao to Marxism but also communicated his own chiliastic faith in the October Revolution and his heretical populist ideas. His 1919 call for intellectuals to go to the countryside is seen as having started Mao "on the road to that rediscovery" of the peasantry.Template:Sfn Mao's early writings from 1919 faithfully echoed Li's nationalist, populist, and Bolshevik ideas.Template:Sfn In their later development of Marxist theory, both Li and Mao prioritized conscious human will over deterministic laws, saw China's backwardness as an advantage for revolution, and blended revolutionary voluntarism with a powerful messianic nationalism that saw China as destined to play a special role in world revolution.Template:Sfn Mao himself acknowledged Li's influence, remarking in 1949: "it was in Beijing that I met a great man whose name was Comrade Li Dazhao. Only with his help did I become a communist. He is truly my teacher."Template:Sfn In July 2021, Li's grandson, Li Hongta, was awarded the July 1 Medal, the CCP's highest honor, for carrying on the family's "revolutionary tradition".Template:Sfn
References
Works cited
Further reading
- Original text based on marxists.org article, released under the GNU FDL.
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External links
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- 1889 births
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- Communists executed by the Republic of China
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- Delegates to the 3rd National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party
- Members of the 2nd Central Executive Committee of the Chinese Communist Party
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- People from Laoting County
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