Chen Duxiu (1879–1942)

Chinese communist politician, party leader 1921–27. A founder member of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its leader from July 1921, Chen followed conventional Leninist thinking and sought to foment a socialist revolution in China through CCP-led workers' uprisings in the country's coastal cities. Discredited both by the failure of his efforts and by his association with Trotskyist groups, Chen was replaced as CCP leader by Li Lisan. He was expelled from the CCP in 1929 and died in Sichuan.

The failure of Chen's efforts was partly a result of the limited size of China's industrial proletariat, but also because of repression by the Kuomintang (Guomindang, nationalist) forces of Jiang Jie Shi (Chiang Kai-shek). In April 1927 Chiang staged a successful coup against the CCP in China to establish a new right-wing Kuomintang government, with its headquarters in Nanjing.

Born in Huaining in Anhui province, the son of a landlord, Chen had a classical education in Huangzhou, passing the first stage of the imperial civil service examination in 1896. However, influenced by reformers within the imperial administration who advocated modernization and ‘learning from the West’, he studied abroad in Tokyo and France 1902–10 and became an advocate of such liberal concepts as democracy and science. He set up the journal New Youth in 1915 and became a lecturer at Beijing University in 1918, participating in the May Fourth Movement (on 4 May 1919), in which Chinese nationalists protested against the Conference of Versailles decision not to require Japan to hand over to China recently occupied German concessions. Radicalized by the May Fourth Movement, Chen became a founding member of the Chinese Communist Party.