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Li Ta-chao and the Origins of Chinese Marxism Maurice Meisner HARVARD EAST ASIAN SERIES Harvard University Press LI TA-CHAO AND THE ORIGINS OF CHINESE MARXISM Harvard East Asian Series 27 The East Asian Research Center at Harvard University administers research projects designed to further scholarly understanding of China, Korea, Japan, and adjacent areas. Li Ta-chao in the igzo's LI TA-CHAO AND THE ORIGINS OF CHINESE MARXISM BY MAURICE MEISNER Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts 1967 © Copyright 1967 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Distributed in Great Britain by Oxford University Press, London Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 67-10904 Printed in the United States of America Preparation of this volume was aided by a grant from the Ford Foundation. The Foundation is not, however, the author, owner, publisher, or proprietor of this publication and is not to be understood as approving by virtue of its grant any of the statements made or views expressed therein. To Earl Pritchard and Leopold Haimson ACKNOWLEDGMENTS THE RITUAL of writing an Acknowledgments page is a very inade- quate means of thanking friends and teachers who have been so generous with their time and ideas. Intellectual debts cannot be discharged, and the kindness of friends cannot be returned, by perfunctory expressions of gratitude such as those that follow. This study originated as a doctoral dissertation prepared for the Department of History at the University of Chicago. To my teachers there I am grateful for providing me with many years of intellectual stimulation as well as for indulging me with more fellow- ships than I deserved. I owe special debts to Professors Earl H. Pritchard and Leopold H. Haimson, to whom this book is dedicated. The writing of the book was accomplished mainly at the East Asian Research Center of Harvard University, where I spent a year as a post-doctoral research fellow. Were it not for that excel- lent year, this book would never have appeared. I am profoundly grateful to Professors John K. Fairbank and Benjamin Schwartz for their patient reading and incisive criticism of various versions of the manuscript and for their many other kindnesses. I apologize to many friends and colleagues upon whom I in- flicted, at one time or another, parts or all of the manuscript. I ap- preciate especially the criticism and advice provided by Dr. Conrad Brandt, Mr. Edward Friedman, Professor Sylvia Glagov, Professor Stephen Hay, Mr. Winston Hsieh, Dr. Ellis Joffe, Professor Lin Yü-sheng, Professor Mark Mancall, Dr. Stuart Schram, Professor Franz Schurmann, and Professor Ezra Vogel. I should also like to express my appreciation to the Ford Founda- tion, who granted me a Foreign Area Training Fellowship to undertake the research for this study, and to the Social Science Research vii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Council, whose grant enabled me to complete the manuscript in the summer of 1964. Thanks are also due to Professors Julian Bishko and Robert Langbaum of the Research Committee of the University of Virginia for financing the typing of the final version of the manuscript and to Mrs. Margaret Pertzoff for actually performing the task. Throughout the preparation of this study, my wife, Dr. Lorraine Faxon Meisner, served nobly as typist, critic, and proofreader. For this, but also for other and more important things, I wish to express to her my very deepest affection. Needless to say, neither the organizations nor individuals men- tioned above are responsible for the views, interpretations, and mis- interpretations that appear in the following pages. All errors of fact and judgment are my own, but there would have been many more of them were it not for those whose generous assistance is acknowledged here. viii CONTENTS INTRODUCTION CHRONOLOGY Part One: The Origins of a Chinese Marxist I THE EARLY YEARS II PRELUDE TO REVOLUTION III THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION AND THE INTRODUCTION OF MARXISM IV THE POPULIST STRAIN V MARXISM AND THE MAY FOURTH MOVEMENT Part Two: The Reinterpretation of Marxism VI DETERMINISM AND ACTIVISM VII PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY VIII NATIONALISM AND INTERNATIONALISM Part Three: Politics IX LENINISM AND POPULISM X NATIONAL REVOLUTION CONTENTS XI PEASANT REVOLUTION EPILOGUE 257 NOTES 269 BIBLIOGRAPHY 299 GLOSSARY 315 INDEX 319 χ INTRODUCTION THE YEAR 1927 ended the first phase of the history of the Chinese Communist movement. The tiny Communist groups that had been organized seven years before by Ch'en Tu-hsiu and Li Ta-chao from among a handful of their more devoted student followers had grown with a speed unparalleled in the history of Communist parties. In the appearance of militant labor and student organizations, in the peasant risings, and in the seething anti-imperialist crusade that marked China's great revolutionary upsurge of the mid-1920's, the Chinese Communist party was centrally involved and frequently exercised a dominant influence. The early successes of the Chinese Communists were all the more remarkable in that they occurred in a country which lacked a Marx- ist Social-Democratic tradition and in which the material prerequi- sites for the realization of the Marxist program were almost totally absent. Although such deficiencies have since been converted into positive advantages by Chinese Communist ideologists, those of less "dialectical" persuasions may be inclined to attribute the early Communist successes, in part, to the political vacuum left by the collapse of the Ch'ing dynasty in 1911 and the chaotic years of separatist warlord rule and civil war that followed. In part, the early triumphs of the Chinese Communists in what was then called the "national revolution" were dependent upon the same tactical factor that soon led to their near destruction — the Comintern- sponsored alliance with the Kuomintang. The united front with the party of Sun Yat-sen helped to provide the Communists with access to the popular movement, but the military power of the alliance xi INTRODUCTION remained firmly in the hands of the Nationalists. In the spring of 1927 Chiang Kai-shek chose to exercise that power against his Communist allies. On April 12 in Shanghai Chiang abruptly shat- tered the united front and began the bloody reign of terror that destroyed the Communist and labor movements in the major urban centers of China and very nearly extinguished the party itself. Six days before Chiang Kai-shek struck in Shanghai, a grim prelude to the disasters that were to befall the Chinese Communist party began in Peking, then under the control of warlord forces hostile to both the Communists and the Nationalists. On April 6, Li Ta-chao, the leader of the party in North China, was arrested in the Soviet embassy compound in Peking by soldiers of the Man- churian warlord Chang Tso-lin. Three weeks later, still in his thirty- ninth year, Li was secretly executed by strangulation. Li is now honored by the Chinese Communist party as its first true leader and its greatest martyr. He is not the Lenin of China, for that honor is reserved for Mao Tse-tung. But Li represents the link between the older generation of democratically oriented and Western-educated intellectuals of the early phase of the New Cul- ture movement (ca. 1915-1919), from whom the first Chinese Marxists emerged, and the new generation of young Communist intellectuals who inherited party leadership after 1927. In the un- broken chain of continuity that the Chinese Communists are at- tempting to forge with the Chinese past, Li is the link just preceding Mao Tse-tung. A professor of history and the chief librarian at Peking Univer- sity, Li Ta-chao was the first important Chinese intellectual to declare his support for the Russian October Revolution. He is also known as one of the two principal founders of the Chinese Com- munist party and a leading architect of the ill-fated Communist alliance with the Kuomintang. Yet Li was perhaps less important as a Communist political leader than as a Chinese interpreter of Marx- ist theory. He was the first to undertake the task of adapting Marxism to the Chinese environment. He not only introduced Marxist-Leninist ideas but was the harbinger of changes that were to come, for his writings foreshadowed the most explosive revolutionary ideology of our time — the combination of a voluntaristic interpretation of Marxism and a militant nationalism. Li's interpretation of Marxist doctrine profoundly influenced both the thought xii INTRODUCTION and the actions of a whole generation of future Chinese Communist leaders. Not the least of these was his young assistant at the Peking University Library in the crucial winter months of 1918-1919, Mao Tse-tung. This book is in part a study of the intellectual evolution of China's first Marxist, Li Ta-chao. It is also a study of the early reception and transformation of Marxist ideas in China. The chap- ters which follow are concerned with Marxist theory as a philo- sophic world view, as an interpretation of history and social change, and as a theory of revolution. Although some attention is paid to the manner in which Li Ta-chao's interpretation of Marxist doctrine was reflected in his political practice, no attempt is made to investigate in any detail the fluctuating "party line" and the polemi- cal writings that were linked directly with the political strategy and internal disputes of the Chinese Communist party in the 1920's. The study begins with the assumption that Marxist theory qua theory has been (and still is) an historical force in its own right which has molded as well as reflected Chinese reality. It is further assumed that the various political strategies employed by the Chi- nese Communist party were at least partially the product of the way in which Chinese Communist leaders understood and inter- preted the inherited body of Marxist ideas.

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