A native of Changzhou, Jiangsu Province, Qu Qubai entered the Russian Language Institute of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of China in 1917, where he received no tuition fees and had an “origin”; in 1921, he was sent to Moscow as a journalist, and in May 1921, he joined the Russian Communist Party. In the spring of 1922, he joined the Chinese Communist Party. In his early years, he did a lot of work introducing the Russian Revolution and propagating Marxism.
On August 7, 1927, the delegate of the Communist International, Mr. Lominaz, presided over a meeting in Wuhan and formally removed Chen Duxiu, the first leader of the CPC, from his post and appointed Qu Qubai to preside over the Central Committee, making Qu the second leader of the CPC.
In 1930, he returned to Shanghai with his wife Yang Zhihua, and in early 1934, he went to Ruijin, Jiangxi Province, to serve as the People’s Commissar for Education of the “Chinese Soviet Republic”. “On February 24, 1935, he was arrested by the local security group in Changting, Fujian Province, and on June 18 of the same year, he was “shot on the spot” by the government of the Republic of China at the age of 36.
Death of Qu Qubai
On the day Qu Qiubai was “shot”, the government of the Republic of China posted a bulletin saying, “After the 16th year of the Republic of China, the actions of the communist bandits were instigated by the bandits, and the lives and properties in Gan, Anhui, Fujian, Guangdong, Hunan, Eurasia, Sichuan and other provinces were directly and indirectly killed and burned by the bandits, which could not be counted. Their crimes were so great that they could not be punished.”
Since its establishment in 1921, the CCP became a branch of the Communist International led by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In line with Soviet foreign policy, the violent subversion of the legal government of China, the Republic of China, was one of its most important goals.
On August 1, 1927, the Communist Party launched the Nanchang Riot, starting the process of violent subversion of the Republic of China by the Chinese Communist Party. This decision was made with the participation of Qu Qubai. Thereafter, Qu led a series of armed riots in various regions and actively prepared for the “National General Riot”.
During this period, besides the “Autumn Harvest Riot” in Hunan, Puqi, Xianning, Public Security, Shishou, Songzi, Shashi, Tongcheng, Tongshan, Chongyang, Xiaogan, Macheng, Huang’an and Honghu in Hubei, Xiushui, De’an, Yiyang, Poyang, Hengfeng and Wan’an in Jiangxi, Guangzhou, Haifeng, Lufeng and Qiongya in Guangdong, Yixing, Jiangyin, Wuxi and Chongming in Jiangsu, and so on. JiangYin, Wuxi and Chongming in Jiangsu, SifangShan and Guangshan in Henan, Yutian in Hebei and QingJian in Shaanxi, all of them had armed riots.
In November 1927, Qu Qubai sent Zhang Tailei, a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China, to Guangzhou to prepare for a riot, and on December 11, the rioters occupied Guangzhou and established the “Guangzhou Soviet Government”, but they were defeated on the third day and Zhang Tailei died in a chaotic shooting.
Despite the successive failures of the revolts, Qu still emphasized that the Chinese revolution was at its “climax” and made the decision to “carry out as much red terror as possible”, instructing all regions to “kill all members of the reorganization committee, workers, detectives, and reactionary foremen”. and reactionary foremen”, “kill all the landlords, big landlords, and burn the houses of landlords”, “kill government officials and all counter-revolutionaries”.
The Extra Words
From May 17 to 23, 1935, Qu Qubai wrote “Superfluous Words” while he was in prison. In it, he wrote: “I hope that the youth of the future will not follow my example and will not think that what I wrote before represents any doctrine. So I am willing to write a little of my last and most frank words while this remaining Life is not over.”
“Because of ‘historical misunderstandings’, I have been doing political work reluctantly for fifteen years.” “Although I wanted to say repeatedly, ‘Give me a break, I really don’t have the interest and ability to take on this leadership job.’ But finally, I did not say it. “On the one hand, it is certainly because my body is weak and my energy is short, and I am in a state of fatigue; on the other hand, it is also the result of decades of reluctance to take on the political translation and political work for the sake of ‘taking care of the overall situation’, and I have been delaying it, which is really against my interest and temperament. This is really a misunderstanding and a nightmare for more than ten years.”
Since “leaving the political leadership of the Central Committee,” “(I) have in fact been detached from the political scene ever since.” “With regard to politics, I have been gradually less interested since 1927, and in the last year – the year in Ruijin – I really have no interest at all. The work is ‘but seek no fault’ attitude, the national political situation is really lazy to ask. “For seven or eight years, I have long felt a million times bored”. “My political life has actually ended long ago”.
“I tell you: I have left your ranks for a long Time,” and ask you not to “treat me as a martyr of communism”, “because I have never been able to overcome my gentleman’s consciousness, and I cannot become a proletarian fighter after all. I cannot become a proletarian fighter after all”.
I feel no pity for leaving the Communist Party, and likewise, I feel no regret. “I have no friends in my life, and my dear ones are very few. Except for my Zhihua, I have never been completely honest with you. Even to Zhihua, I only revealed a little. I always wore a false mask.” “Now I have lost the last layer of my false mask.”
At the end of the article, there is no mention of a Marxist book, but rather “the Russian Gorky’s Forty Years, Krimo. Kalinina” by Tolstoy, “A Q” by Lu Xun, “Shaken” by Mao Dun, “Dream of the Red Chamber” by Cao Xueqin, all of them can be read again.”
Professor Hsia Chi-an of Taiwan University writes: “The Extra Word is the elegy of a man who has spent his life in vain; it is also a confession of his own weaknesses of cowardice, laziness and hypocrisy …… To its author, politics represents all the ugliness of the world: the exhaustion of energy, the fatal fatigue, the death of the mind , the numbing of the senses, the eternal lie, and the destruction of natural emotions.”
I thought that this comment was closer to Qu’s inner feelings at the time he wrote this article.
Repeated blows during his life
The first blow: After a series of failed armed uprisings led by Qu Qubai from 1927 to 1928, the Communist International used Qu as a scapegoat to shirk responsibility for directing the failure of the CCP’s “Second Domestic Revolutionary War”. Soon, Xiang Zhongfa, a worker, became the third leader of the CCP, and Li Lisan gradually became the de facto head of the CCP.
The second blow: From 1928 to 1930, while Qu was in the Soviet Union as the head of the Communist delegation to the Communist International, Mifu, the deputy head of the Communist International’s Oriental Department for China, instructed Wang Ming, Bogu and other so-called “28 Bolsheviks” to rebel and seize power within the CCP. Qu Qiubai was subjected to “cruel struggles and merciless blows”. In June 1930, Qu was removed from his post as head of the Communist delegation to the International.
The third blow: In September 1930, Qu was sent back to China to attend the Third Plenary Session of the Sixth Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, responsible for solving the problem of Li Lisan’s line. In January 1931, at the Fourth Plenary Session of the Sixth CPC Central Committee, Qu was expelled from the Political Bureau of the CPC. In October, Wang Ming left for Moscow and Bogu became the fourth CPC leader.
The fourth blow: After that, Qu left the center of CCP power to engage in left-wing cultural work in Shanghai, and in the autumn of 1933, Qu received another blow. He had “underestimated the revolutionary situation” and “made a very serious and systematic opportunist mistake. Party organizations at all levels should “carry out the most ruthless struggle” against his mistakes “to ensure the thorough implementation of the Central Committee’s resolution against the five ‘encirclements'”.
The fifth blow: In early 1934, the Communist Party forced Qu Qiubai, who was suffering from a serious lung disease, to leave Shanghai for Ruijin, Jiangxi, where the “Central Soviet” was located, and explicitly forbade his beloved wife, Yang Zhihua, to accompany him. Lin Fan writes in “The Death of Qu Qubai” that after leaving the center of Communist power, “Qu and Yang lived for many years in Shanghai in seclusion. The two lived together, sharing the hardships and sufferings, and became close friends with Lu Xun, who also engaged in the literary creation and translation work that Qu had loved since the beginning,” but “the good times did not last. “The forced separation of Qu and Yang was a continuation of the long-standing feud that Wang Ming and Bogu, who were in charge of the Communist Party at the time, had formed against Qu and Yang since Moscow, and they dealt a merciless blow”.
The sixth blow: In October 1934, the Communist Party failed in the Fifth Anti-Surge and had to evacuate Jiangxi and begin the “Long March”. Qu Qiubai requested to go with the army, but was refused by the Communist Party leader Bo Gu, and had to stay behind in a weak body to “persist in the struggle”. Mao Zedong believed that this was caused by Wang Ming and Bogu’s “intention to dump Qu Qubai as a burden to the enemy” and that they had “objectively done something to kill people with a knife”.
Another blow was physical. Qu Qiubai was a serious lung patient for more than 15 years. He wrote, “I have been sick with hemoptysis since 1919 and have never had a chance to get proper medical treatment. The development of tuberculosis had gone to a very dangerous stage in 1926, the year when fortunately it was barely cured.” “Although now the most dangerous stage of tuberculosis escaped, and the body was simply broken, so weak that he was practically an invalid.”
Another blow after death
On June 10, 1966, shortly after the start of the Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong met with Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh in Hangzhou and said, “You see, several dynasties have mutinied. Chen Duxiu defected, and Qu Qubai wrote a letter of surrender after his arrest.”
During the Cultural Revolution, “Extra Words” was treated as “a traitor’s confession” and “ironclad evidence of surrender and mutiny”, and Qu Qubai was regarded as a “traitor”. “On January 19, 1967, the tomb of Qu’s mother, Jin Hengyu, was smashed in Changzhou; on February 7, a group of rebels went to Mount Babao and smashed the statue on Qu’s tomb; on May 12, another group of Red Guards came to Mount Babao and smashed Qu’s tomb; the tomb of Qu’s father, Qu Shiwei, in Jinan, was also smashed by the Red Guards.
On June 17, 1967, a “conference to denounce the traitor Qu Qiubai” was held at the Chinese Revolutionary Museum, after which a large statue of Qu Qiubai was swept out of Mount Babao.
His wife Yang Zhihua was first said to be praising the “traitor” Qu Qiubai, and was then labeled as a “secret agent and traitor” and sent to an army for isolation. Her daughter, Qu Duyi, was sent to a “May 7” cadre school in Henan Province, and Duyi’s daughter, Xiaonu, was forced to go to Inner Mongolia to join the army. Duyi’s mother and daughter both suffered from serious stomach problems and went to Shanghai to stay with her aunt Yang Zhiying for medical treatment.
In October 1973, Yang Zhihua became critically ill before she was released from quarantine and transferred to Peking University Hospital. When Yang Zhiying rushed to Beijing to visit her, she saw that her sister was as thin as a bone, and her breath was as thin as a silk. Three days later, she passed away. Before she died, Yang Zhihua quietly whispered to Yang Zhiying, “I know too much, I have to be killed.”
Conclusion
After the end of the Cultural Revolution, the CCP “rehabilitated” Qu Qubai, saying that he was not a “traitor” and gave him various “laurels”. This was merely a political necessity and a self-deception on the part of the Chinese Communist Party.
Qu Qubai’s last words, “Extra Words,” reflected on his life and spoke his heartfelt words. He was “extremely weary” of the CCP’s struggle for your life and everyone’s performance in false masks. He had no attachment to the Marxism he had once propagated, and no “pity” for leaving the CCP. The long suffering from illness, coupled with the successive political blows, made him desperate, unable to see any light and hope, and wanting only to be relieved as soon as possible.
Qu’s final list of books had nothing to do with the “great Marxists”.
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