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The Political Trajectories of Chen Duxiu and Qu Qiubai, Two Founding Leaders of the Chinese Communist Party: to Communism and Back Again

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The Political Trajectories of Chen Duxiu and Qu Qiubai, Two Founding Leaders of the Chinese Communist Party: to Communism and Back Again THE POLITICAL TRAJECTORIES OF CHEN DUXIU AND QU QIUBAI, TWO FOUNDING LEADERS OF THE CHINESE COMMUNIST PARTY: TO COMMUNISM AND BACK AGAIN A THESIS Presented to The Faculty of the Department of History Colorado College In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Bachelor of Arts By Kelly Cheung December/2012 Cheung 2 Table of Contents Preface and Introduction 4 List of Abbreviations 9 Names 9 Brief Historiography 10 Biographic Similarities 16 Early Family Life 16 Education and Pre-Marxist Revolutionary Activities 22 Professional Posts 24 The Western-Informed Development of Marxism in Chen Duxiu and Qu Qiubai 27 Introduction 27 Historiography 28 Historical Context – Previous Attempts at Reform in China 30 “What is Marxism?” as Interpreted by Lenin and Stalin 32 Chen and the Deweyan Individual 39 Chen’s Shift From Anti-Traditionalism 42 The West as Interpreted through Dewey and Lenin 44 Dewey’s Lessons on Cultural, Political and Economic Arrangements 48 The Impact of Deweyan Thought on Qu 59 Chen’s Conversion to Marxism and the Role of the Comintern 60 Comintern’s Role in the Rise of the CCP 61 The Peak of Chen’s Marxism 66 Qu Qiubai’s Critical Role in the Chinese Understanding of Marxism 71 Conclusion 75 Shaping the Chinese Literary Revival 77 Introduction 77 Problems of Using Literature as Propaganda 80 The Use and Debate over Western European and Russian Influences 83 Personal Writing Styles 86 The Rise of Anti-Confucianism In The Post-WWI Era 90 The Literary Revolution’s Audience and Enlightened Leader 95 Qu’s Critical Development As Fostered by Marxist Studies 106 Coercive Influence of the Comintern 112 Chen’s Loss of Self at the Hands of the Comintern 114 Conclusion 126 Recantation: Chen’s Return to Western Ideals and Qu’s Return to the Chinese Classics 128 Historiography 128 Chen’s Animosity Against Politics 130 WWII and Progress Toward Democracy 133 Historiography of Qu’s Superfluous Words 137 Rejection of Public Life and Political Work 139 Conclusion 143 Appendix 147 China Timeline 147 Europe/The West Timeline 149 Cheung 3 Bibliography 150 Cheung 4 Preface and Introduction The fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911 ushered in the end of the 4,000-year-old Chinese dynastic system of governance, and the beginning of endless opportunity for a new political system. Attacks on the Qing were in part fueled by reformers attempting to adapt the system to the changes of the 20th century, and in part fueled by the expansion of warlords’ control over vast tracks of both rural and urban land in the country. One of the most notable warlords, Wu Peifu, almost succeeded in overpowering the other warlords in 1924, but a mutiny prevented this. These two groups, reformers and warlords, which emerged during the last years of the Qing dynasty prefigure the constant tension between reform-in-theory and militarism-in-practice that Chinese leaders face.1 The fall of Wu proved the impossibility of a warlord-dominated territory in the face of impending Western imperialistic powers. The two Opium Wars, 1839-42 and 1856-60, stripped the Qing dynasty of a level of respect, especially on the international stage, and took away any remaining level of Chinese autonomy. Chinese political reformers signaled the general shift of modern governments from pursuing authoritarian programs to listening and responding to the needs and wants of the people. To pursue a responsive and responsible political program, China needed a change in what constituted the prevailing political theory, towards a system more democratic and dynamic. Two early and formative Chinese Communist Party leaders, Chen Duxiu (1879 – 1942) and Qu Qiubai (1899 – 1935), were largely responsible for the importation of Western ideas of government. The field of Chinese communist history is overrun with 1 Peter Gue Zarrow, China in War and Revolution, 1895-1949, (London: Routledge, 2005), 87. Cheung 5 books about Mao, but the intellectual fruition of communist ideology and importation to China rests on the efforts of Chen and Qu. Their contribution to the development of the CCP into a real political party with actual clout in China from its inception to the 1930s shows they deserve probably more scholarship than they have received. Interest in Chen arose before interest in Qu, but a natural link between them seemed to naturally emerge. After studying their respective backgrounds, I found significant similarities unaddressed in my sources. Capitalism’s supremacy remained virtually unchallenged until the rise of Marxist- Leninist communism in Soviet Russia. The daily effects of Western capitalism, most notably in the port cities but including the trickle-down effects to the countryside, were inextricably linked the more contemptible effects of Western imperialism and colonization. The Beiyang Government, the "government" that followed the fall of the Qing, was coerced into maintaining the dynastic trade concessions to foreign markets. The struggle for a unified national identity was compounded by the country’s land mass and ethnic makeup as noted earlier; but also involved seeking liberation and independence from the West. The need to establish a national identity that was indigenous to the Chinese was dwarfed by the economic powers of the West. The level of independence is naturally limited by the integration of the capitalist- imperialist international market, but is also by Western-minded reformers. The revolutionary route taken by the emergent Western democracies of the 18th century – England, France, and the US – served as one possible solution to a post-Dynastic China. The more recent success of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 also had great appeal because of its radical ideological and geographic differences from the imperialism of the West. The Cheung 6 answer to a post-dynastic China lay in an adoption of some already instituted form of governance – most sharply divided among the lines of democracy versus socialism. Because Chen and Qu were unique in their roles as some of the very first pioneers of developing a Chinese government, they were still struggling with the questions of Chinese versus Western political ideology – which inevitably included the conflict between a peaceful or armed revolution to instill a new way of living. The Anglo-West was not the only foreign power that threatened Chinese sovereignty and modern development; Japan was stabilizing and increasing their own colonial possessions in China. A key difference between the Anglo-West and Japan was the latter’s desire to occupy and conquer China, assimilate her and validate the small island’s capacity in an international field. The era of the Meiji Restoration (1868 – 1912) included an assimilation of the Western mode of capitalism, which heralded great domestic growth. This new economic flourishing allowed for Japan to pursue an international colonization program of its own, one directed towards challenging the hegemony of the West in the Far East. Japan’s colonial aggression against America most notably materialized in their railway construction in Manchuria (1898 – 1903), the First Sino-Japanese War (1894 – 1895), and the Nanjing Massacre (6 weeks in 1937). Without the advent of WWII, Japan’s potential to conquer a China that was embroiled in civil war was surely promising. The most competent form of a domestic political party to solve the confusion and displacement of the Chinese population within their own land was the Guomindang (GMD) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) because of their organization and membership prominence. The self-proclaimed Nationalist party of China (the GMD) ruled by Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek throughout the 20th century has a longer history than the CCP, as it Cheung 7 was founded in Hawaii in 1894 by western-educated Sun Yat-sen. Sun Yat-sen formulated the basic guiding principles of the GMD, but Yuan Shikai’s megalomania pushed Sun out of leadership in China, and Yuan subsequently served as president from 1912-16. Yuan’s concessions to Western and Japanese powers and conviction to reviving the dynastic system was obviously not the kind of answer appropriate to the emerging modernity in China. Following Yuan’s death in 1916, there was a 12-year period of political discord – virtually provisioning the further fortification of warlord-controlled territory. Warlordism proved unsustainable against the strengthening of both the physical and theoretical basis of the GMD and CCP. The strength of the GMD was historically founded in their military might, most clearly exemplified by the rise of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek in the late 1920s, and the founding of the Whampoa Military Academy in 1924. The relative youth of the CCP in comparison to the GMD – being founded in 1921, 27 years after the GMD – made it more difficult for them to accrue members, arms, funding and all the other elements necessary to successfully rise against a country with an established counter-political presence. Despite the GMD’s claim to nationalism and the CCP’s use of “Chinese” in their name – both these parties were heavily influenced by foreign ideals, Western and Russian alike, and attempted to appropriate them to their transitional state. Foreign influence remained a key element in the rise of domestic parties such as the GMD and the CCP. Translations of major political and cultural works alike, from Marx to Chernyshevsky, Dewey to Seignobos, Russell to colonial newspapers, were slowly becoming more widely available. This was in conjunction with the literary movements heralded by CCP leaders Chen Duxiu and Qu Qiubai. The 1911 Revolution that brought Cheung 8 down the Qing prefigured the rise of individualism as a response to the illegitimacy of Chinese traditionalism. Cultural aspects were taken into greater consideration with the dawn of a new style of polity – where the position of the individual as a political citizen was becoming a central tenant to modern government.
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