LI HANJUN AND THE EARLY COMMUNIST MOVEMENT IN CHINA Li Danyang School of History and Archaeology Cardiff University Thesis Submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy to the School of History and Archaeology, Cardiff University January 2011 Summary of Li Hanjun and the Early Communist Movement in China This thesis explores the role Li Hanjun played in the initial stage of the Communist movement in China. It describes Li‘s early life, including his family background, his upbringing, his schooling and the environment he grew up in. It analyses some of Li‘s early writings to demonstrate his philosophical predispositions and political orientation, as well as his character and temperament. It examines Li‘s understanding of Marxism and his endeavours to disseminate it and to introduce various socialist theories into China. It describes his contacts with socialists of other countries and his cooperation with Korean socialists and Soviet agents in China, which helped open up the Communist movement in East Asia. The research focuses on Li Hanjun‘s activities in establishing the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the opinions he expressed at the Party‘s founding congress. It also deals with his ideas and actions in directing labour movements in China. Li Hanjun was a dissident within the CCP and later left the Party. This study clarifies the divergence of views between him and other Party leaders, and shows that his rejection of the Bolshevik doctrines of centralism and dictatorship and of unconditional receipt of financial aid and orders from the Communist International (Comintern) were the main causes of the conflicts and his expulsion. The thesis discusses Li‘s vision of socialism, and shows that his ideal socialist society was not one in which a centralist government and the dictatorship of a Communist élite should control and intervene in everything but a collectivity of associations of free and autonomous working people organised in cooperatives. The thesis ends with a critical assessment of Li as a historical figure. It recovers historical facts that have sunk into oblivion, and thus differs from comparable studies published both in China and abroad. It fills important gaps in the history of the early Communist movement in China. ii This thesis is the result of my own work and includes nothing that is the outcome of work done in collaboration with others. This thesis is about 80,000 words long, and has not been submitted before for a degree either in Cardiff University or elsewhere. iii Contents ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ⅵ ABBREVIATIONS ⅸ INTRODUCTION 1 1 A PROMISING YOUTH 11 1.1 FORMATIVE ENVIRONMENT 11 1.2 EARLY YEARS IN WUCHANG 16 1.3 STUDYING IN JAPAN 21 1.4 THE BAPTISM INTO NEW THINKING 28 2 SEEKING WAYS TO RECONSTRUCT CHINA 38 2.1 ‘THE DARKEST HOURS OF CHAOS’ IN CHINA 38 2.2 THROWING HIMSELF INTO THE ‘CHINESE ENLIGHTENMENT’ 40 2.3 ‘TRANSFORMATION SHOULD BE COMPLETE’ 49 3 INTERPRETING AND DISSEMINATING MARXISM 66 3.1 THE SOURCE OF LI HANJUN’S MARXIST STUDIES 67 3.2 ‘HOW SHOULD WE EVOLVE?’ 70 3.3 URGING PEOPLE TO STUDY SOCIALIST THEORIES SYSTEMATICALLY 73 3.4 TRANSLATING MARXIST WORKS 76 3.5 INTRODUCING AND POPULARISING MARXIST ECONOMIC THEORY 80 3.6 ELABORATING ON THE MATERIALIST CONCEPTION OF HISTORY 83 4 A FOUNDING MEMBER OF THE CCP 95 4.1 ADVANCING THE IDEA OF FORMING A PROLETARIAN PARTY 95 4.2 ‘A CHINESE BOLSHEVIK’ 100 4.3 A KEY LINK BETWEEN SOCIALISTS IN EAST ASIA 106 4.4 ‘A CENTRAL FIGURE’ IN THE FOUNDING OF THE EMBRYONIC PARTY 115 4.5 BUILDING A NATIONWIDE COMMUNIST PARTY IN CHINA 127 4.6 AT THE FOUNDING CONGRESS 134 4.7 A CRITICAL SUMMARY 142 5 PIONEERING THE CHINESE LABOUR MOVEMENT 148 iv 5.1 DEVOTION TO THE EMANCIPATION OF THE PROLETARIAT 149 5.2 A LEADER OF THE LABOUR MOVEMENT IN THE CCP’S FOUNDING PERIOD 155 5.3 PROMOTING WORKERS’ ORGANISATIONS IN HUBEI 163 5.4 ACTIVITIES AROUND THE JING-HAN RAILWAY STRIKE 169 5.5 STRIVING FOR LABOURERS’ LEGAL RIGHTS 175 5.6 ENCOURAGING INTELLECTUALS TO INTEGRATE WITH LABOURERS 177 6 WITHDRAWAL FROM THE CCP 182 6.1 ON THE UNITED FRONT 182 6.2 ON THE CCP’S RELATIONS WITH THE COMINTERN AND THE SOVIET UNION 188 6.3 ON THE COMMUNISTS’ MEANS OF SUBSISTENCE 191 6.4 ON PARTY CENTRALISM 197 6.5 PERSONAL CONFLICTS WITHIN THE PARTY 203 7 VIEWS ON SOCIALISM 210 7.1 INTRODUCING VARIOUS SCHOOLS OF SOCIALISM 211 7.2 WHY DID CHINA HAVE TO TAKE THE SOCIALIST ROAD? 214 7.3 HOW TO BRING ABOUT A TRANSITION TO SOCIALISM IN CHINA? 219 7.4 WHAT KIND OF INSTITUTIONS SHOULD GOVERN THE FUTURE SOCIALIST SOCIETY? 225 7.5 LI HANJUN’S VISION OF THE ECONOMIC SYSTEM OF THE FUTURE SOCIETY 233 CONCLUSIONS 245 SECTION1. MAIN POINTS AND FINDINGS 245 SECTION 2. LI HANJUN’S TRAGIC FATE 248 SECTION 3. COMMENTS ON LI HANJUN’S CHARACTER AND THINKING 250 SECTION 4. ENDS AND MEANS 254 SECTION 5. A FINAL ASSESSMENT 261 BIBLIOGRAPHY 263 v Acknowledgements I have long wanted to write a monograph on Li Hanjun. As early as 1980 I started collecting materials, but for various reasons, I did not set about the job until 2003, when I become a PhD student under Professor Gregor Benton of the School of History and Archaeology at Cardiff University. First of all, I would like to thank my supervisor, Professor Benton, for his invaluable advice and considerable instructions that helped me to improve the text. I am grateful to my friends, Ms Hilary Jarvis and Ms Barbara Koscia, for their kindness in finding time to help me by proofreading and polishing my draft and in encouraging me when I felt my English was too poor to write a dissertation. In the long years spent preparing the paper I incurred countless debts of gratitude. In the early 1980s in Beijing, together with Liu Jianyi and Tian Ziyu, I interviewed many old people who had known Li Hanjun personally or indirectly. During my interviews and investigations in Wuhan in 1981, Li Shengyi (Li Hanjun‘s second daughter), Gan Zijiu (Li Hanjun‘s maternal grandson) and He Juefei (a historian in Hubei) gave me much help. Liu Xiaoming, then a worker at a factory and later an employee of the Office of Qianjiang County Annals, and Feng Naichao, former Vice President of Sun Yat-sen University, encouraged us in our interview work. There were virtually no photocopiers, typewriters, or personal computers in China at the time, so friends and relatives, notably Wang Mei, Li Xiaowen, Li Jie and Liu Nanhong, laboured patiently to make clean copies of the writings of Li Hanjun and of people‘s oral and written recollections of him that I then edited. Chen Shaokang, Research Fellow at the Memorial House of the First National Congress of the CCP, sent me a copy of his interviews with Zheng Chaolin and some materials on Li. Yang Tianshi, Research Fellow at the Institute of Modern History, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), helped me obtain archival materials kept in Tokyo University when he visited Japan in 1986. Kubo Tōru of Tokyo University, Yamaguchi Takuji of Nagoya University Archives, together with Tuji Koichi of the Alumni Association of the First Higher School searched records for the relevant documents for me. My deepest debt is to my husband Liu Jianyi. Together with him, I hunted down and collected numerous oral recollections and materials concerning Li Hanjun in old publications. In late 1989, he took the bulk of the materials with him to Britain, vi travelling initially along the Tran-Siberia Railway. The materials he brought to Britain were essential for this study. After finishing his own PhD, he encouraged me to write a dissertation on Li Hanjun and has shouldered the burden of supporting our family while I did so. After I resumed my research on Li Hanjun, Tian Ziyu, a Professor at Hubei University, mailed me the notes he had made while interviewing several old people who had known Li Hanjun, together with some of Li‘s articles. Ishikawa Yoshihiro, Associate Professor of Kyoto University, provided me with some valuable Japanese materials, including an article written by Li Hanjun in Japanese, some Japanese people‘s recollections of Li Hanjun and several archival documents kept in Japan. Recently, a Korean scholar, Professor Kim Suyong of Kookmin University, provided me with some documents from the Shanghai Municipal Police files, which she obtained from the library of the University of California, Berkeley. These cannot be found in the Shanghai Municipal Archives. Feng Aizhu, a translator-cum-reviser, now is teaching Chinese in Japan, forwarded my inquiries to Gyosei School, Tokyo University and Nagoya University (the successor of the Eighth Higher School, Nagoya) where Li Hanjun had studied, and passed on to me their replies with archival documents, and translated some Japanese materials into Chinese. When I encountered difficulties in finding or translating Russian materials, Li Yuzhen, Research Fellow at the Institute of Modern History, CASS, generously offered her help. The Russian historians K. Shevelyov, N. Mamaeva and M. Kriukov kindly provided me with important information I needed for my research. L. Sladkov sent me several images of Russian newspapers he found for me in libraries in Russia. I am grateful to Professor Cao Tianyu of Boston University for his enlightening opinions on various philosophical issues in our discussions about my Dissertation when he came to the UK as visiting professor to Cambridge University and Oxford University. My recent correspondence with Guan Xian‘an of the Office of Party History in Qianjiang City yielded accurate information regarding the name of the village where Li Hanjun was born and some events in Qianjiang in modern times.