In the history of the Chinese Communist Party, Chen Duxiu is a name that cannot be avoided – even though the Communist Party deliberately downplays it. The reason is that he was not only the first intellectual to propagate Marxism and advocate “total Westernization” in China, but also the main founder and first general secretary of the CCP in its early years. However, in his later years, such a man, who had spread Marxism with great enthusiasm, completely reflected on himself, abandoned communist ideas, opposed the Soviet Union, supported the war against Japan led by Chiang Kai-shek, and believed that only democratic politics could save China, believing that democracy in Britain, the United States and France represented the hope of mankind. This is where the Chinese Communist Party criticizes him, and where it is unable to “positively evaluate” Chen Duxiu.
“Consequences of the “New Culture Movement
Born in 1879 in Anqing, Anhui Province, Chen Duxiu, formerly known as Chen Qingtong, was a successful candidate at the age of 17 and then studied in Japan, where he was influenced by socialist ideas. After returning to China, he participated in the “Second Revolution” against Yuan Shikai. At that Time, in the face of China’s repeated failures to meet the challenges from the West, some intellectuals who advocated learning from the West began to think about traditional Chinese culture, and Chen Duxiu was one of the representatives.
In 1915, Chen Duxiu founded the Youth Magazine in Shanghai (changed to New Youth the following year), which propagated Western democracy and freedom and criticized Chinese Confucianism and traditional morality, and proposed that one of Eastern and Western cultures was old and the other was new, and that the new should be used to transform the old. The New Youth soon became the center of the “New Culture Movement” and influenced many young people.
After Cai Yuanpei became the president of Peking University in 1917, Chen Duxiu was appointed to teach literature at Peking University, so he moved the New Youth to Beijing and continued to promote Marxism-Leninism and Western democratic and liberal ideas at Peking University. As a result of the “New Culture Movement” initiated by Chen Duxiu, traditional Chinese standards of right and wrong and values were shattered, traditional Chinese beliefs were denied, and the vernacular language was used instead of the literary language, which led to the first complete denial and destruction of traditional Chinese culture.
In 1920, Cai Yuanpei was forced to dismiss Chen Duxiu from his position after he was criticized by some Peking University professors for visiting prostitutes. Thereafter, Chen Duxiu went to Shanghai and continued to write radical articles in the Weekly Review, a magazine he founded.
Expelled from the Chinese Communist Party
With the help of the Communist International, the CCP was founded in 1921 and Chen Duxiu was elected as the first General Secretary. Thereafter, he was also elected chairman of the 2nd and 3rd Central Executive Committee of the CCP and general secretary of the 4th and 5th Central Committees. in 1922, the Communist International instructed the CCP to cooperate with Sun Yat-sen and the Kuomintang, to which Chen Duxiu objected but eventually reluctantly complied and agreed to join the Kuomintang. in 1927, after the Kuomintang split the Communist Party, Chen Duxiu also directed the Shanghai Workers’ Riot in Shanghai.
Despite his “great contribution” to the founding and development of the CCP, Chen Duxiu was eventually abandoned by the Communist International for siding with the Trotskyists in the Soviet Union who believed that “the CCP could only call for a national conference to solve the most important problems of the country”.
In 1927, when the Kuomintang was “purged”, Stalin’s idea of allowing the Communist Party to enter the Kuomintang was defeated. Trotsky, another leader of the Soviet Communist Party at that time, formulated a political program for the CCP entitled “The Political Situation in China and the Tasks of the Opposition”, arguing that “China has entered a period of political stability and economic recovery, and the CCP can only demand the convening of a national conference to solve the most important problems of the country “The Chinese Communist Party can only call for a national conference to solve the most important problems of the country. Chen Duxiu agreed with this. However, Stalin did not admit his mistake, criticized Trotsky and Chen Duxiu, and dismissed Chen Duxiu from his post as General Secretary in August 1927.
In June 1928, the Sixth Congress of the Communist Party of China was held in Moscow, but Chen Duxiu refused to attend. During the “East China Road Incident” in 1929, Chen Duxiu opposed the Communist Party’s disregard for national interests and its “defense of the Soviet Union”. In November of that year, Chen Duxiu was expelled from the CCP.
Afterwards, Chen Duxiu organized the Chinese “Trotskyists”, which published magazines with articles by Trotsky, opposing the policies of the Chinese Communist Party and the Kuomintang.
Anti-Communist path
In October 1932, Chen Duxiu was arrested by the Kuomintang, and during his five years in prison, he read a lot of books and began to reflect on them; after his release from prison in 1937, he abandoned his Marxist ideas and believed that only democratic politics could save China.
What made Chen Duxiu come to his senses? Perhaps the reason can be found in the book “The Last Insights of Chen Duxiu in His Later Years (Essays and Letters)”. This book contains four essays and six letters written by Chen Duxiu to his friends between March 2, 1940 and May 13, 1942. According to Tao Xisheng, who was close to Chen Duxiu at the time, the main content of “The Last Opinions” is “Chen Duxiu’s last opinion on democratic politics”, a conclusion he reached after six or seven years of careful consideration.
Chen Duxiu’s main view was that only a mass regime could realize mass democracy, and that if mass democracy could not be realized, the so-called “proletarian dictatorship” would inevitably become a Stalinist dictatorship of the minority; that replacing bourgeois democracy with mass democracy was progressive, and replacing British, French and American democracy with German and Russian dictatorship was retrogressive. Proletarian democracy should have the same freedom of assembly, association, speech and publication as bourgeois democracy; while the content of democracy certainly includes the parliamentary system, the parliamentary system is not equal to the whole content of democracy.
Chen Duxiu also had a clear understanding of “dictatorship” and equated Soviet dictatorship with fascist dictatorship: “There is no such thing as proletarian dictatorship. bureaucratic politics are inseparable.” “There is no fact that convinces us that the Stalinists are better than the Hitlerites in the fate of human freedom.” “If we do not look for flaws in the system and learn lessons, but simply close our eyes against Stalin, we will never realize that if one Stalin falls, countless others will arise in Russia and elsewhere.” “It was the dictatorship that produced Stalin, not the having of Stalin that produced the dictatorship.”
With regard to Anglo-American democracy, Chen Duxiu believed that there was a fundamental difference from the Russian-German-Italian fascist system, and he advocated the united resistance of all parties and argued, “This time, if Germany and Russia had won, humanity would have been darker for at least half a century; if victory had belonged to Britain, France and the United States, bourgeois democracy would have been maintained, and then there would have been the road to democracy for the masses.”
Chen Duxiu’s incisive analysis of the Soviet system and his criticism of Stalin were quite prescient.
In his later years, Chen Duxiu refused to join the CCP and the Kuomintang again, despite his embarrassment of Life. In 1942, Chen Duxiu died in rural Sichuan at the age of 63, and was later buried in Anqing.
Chen Duxiu’s daughters fled the mainland at the age of nearly 60
Chen Duxiu had six children, namely his eldest son Chen Yannian, his second son Chen Qiaonian, his third son Chen Songnian, his fourth son Chen Hennian, his eldest daughter Chen Yuying, and his second daughter Chen Zimei, of whom Yannian, Qiaonian, Songnian, and Yuying were born to Chen Duxiu and his wife Gao Xiaolan, while Hennian and Zimei were born to Chen Duxiu and Gao Manjun.
Among the six children, Chen Yannian and Chen Qiaonian joined the Communist Party of China with their father and were elected to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China at the same time, but they were later killed by the Kuomintang during the “Party Purge”. When Chen Yuying heard of the death of his two brothers, he was overcome with grief and soon passed away.
Chen Duxiu’s third son, Chen Songnian, worked as a primary and secondary school teacher in his early years, and after the establishment of the Chinese Communist Party, he worked in a street kiln factory for more than 30 years, and never moved until he retired in 1980; during this period, he encountered many difficulties because of his father’s special status. As for his fourth son, Chen Henian, although he joined the Communist Party at an early age, he later went to Hong Kong and left the Communist Party; he worked for Sing Tao Daily and passed away in 2000.
The most ill-fated of the children was Chen Duxiu’s youngest daughter, Chen Zimei, whose article “Chen Zimei’s Difficult Life” was published in the Yangcheng Evening News on December 29, 2008, written by Wang Wen. The article revealed that after Chen Duxiu’s relationship with Gao Junman broke up, Chen Zimei and her younger brother Chen Hernian left Shanghai with their mother to live in a ramshackle hut in Nanjing. Forced to make ends meet, Hernian had to attend vocational school on a half-work basis, while she studied telegraph technology and then obstetrics and gynecology. When she was about to graduate, her mother died of illness.
Afterwards, Chen Zimei married Zhang Guoxiang, who was much older than she was, and had three children. Chen Duxiu was not happy with this. During the war, their relationship broke down completely, and after the war was won, they were officially divorced and Chen Zimei was forced to leave her biological children behind and go away alone.
In 1956, Li and Chen moved from Shanghai to Guangzhou.
After the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution, Chen Zimei was branded as a “cow devil and snake god” and a “filial son of China’s biggest right-leaning opportunists”, and was put in a cattle shed and paraded through the streets, suffering all kinds of torture to the point of being bruised. At that time, Chen Zimei was nearly 60 years old. Unable to bear the humiliation, Chen Zimei used her life savings and jewelry and secretly asked someone to tie herself to a gasoline barrel late one night in the 1970s, risking her life and death to smuggle herself to Hong Kong. At that time, no one knew whether she would live or die. Her husband in China, Li Huanzhao, was also thrown into jail on trumped-up charges.
In 1997, Chen Zimei miraculously showed up in New York, USA. The mystery of her escape was completely uncovered. It turned out that after drifting for 10 hours at sea and arriving in Hong Kong, she and her young son, who had also smuggled herself into Hong Kong, went to Canada after a short stay in Hong Kong and lived in a Chinese neighborhood. At first, she worked as an obstetrician in a hospital run by Chinese, and after accumulating some money, she opened a private obstetrics hospital. Because of her medical skills, she was very popular with the Chinese.
In 1975, Tze-Mei Chen settled in the United States and bought a co-op apartment unit. She died in New York in 2008 at the age of 96 after a long illness.
Hong Kong Writer Pauline Lam interviewed Chen Zimei in 1997 and learned that she had been preparing for her escape from the mainland for more than a decade, starting with training her children to swim, and finally being escorted to Hong Kong by her son and his son’s friend, bundled with a gasoline barrel.
The eldest son, Zhang Zhaoshan, born to Chen Zimei and her ex-husband Zhang Guoxiang, joined the army and was sent to study at the Nanjing Aviation Academy, where he was framed and died in prison at the age of 20. Chen Zimei’s two daughters contacted him after he appeared in the United States, but for various reasons, Chen Zimei’s trip to the mainland did not take place.
Conclusion
The special experience of Chen Duxiu, the first leader of the Chinese Communist Party, may serve as an inspiration to those who have been deceived by the Chinese Communist Party, and to those who have realized that they have been deceived but do not want to face it, that Marxism-Leninism and the Chinese Communist Party are the root cause of the suffering of the Chinese people, and that there is no possibility for the Chinese Communist Party to change. If you want to have a free and democratic China, then you have to quit the CCP and work for a truly wonderful new China without the CCP.
Chen Zimei has the same sober understanding of the CCP as his father. I once read an online report that before she died, Chen Zimei heard that the Chinese Communist government had allocated huge sums of money to renovate Chen Duxiu’s tomb. Upon hearing this, she simply smiled lightly and said, “It will cost the people money again, and it may be smashed again at some point!” One word hit the nail on the head of the Chinese Communist Party!
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