Li Lisan (1899–1867)

Chinese communist politician, party leader 1927–30. He became a leading figure in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and a key proponent of the conventional Leninist and Russian-supported line of seeking to foment a proletarian revolution in China's cities and among its industrial workforce.

He was active in Shanghai from 1924 and in the Nanchang uprising of 1927, when he replaced Chen Duxiu as effective leader of the CCP. By the early 1930s, faced with the suppression of the CCP's urban cells by the Kuomintang (Guomindang, nationalist) leader Jiang Jie Shi (Chiang Kai-shek), it was clear that the ‘Li Lisan line’ had failed. A new rural-based, revolutionary approach, devised by Mao Zedong, now gained the upper hand. Li Lisan fled to Moscow in 1931 and was imprisoned there as a Trotskyist in 1936. He returned to China in 1945. Following the establishment of the People's Republic in 1949, he became a minister of labour, until 1954. Thereafter, Li held minor party posts in north China, until his death in December 1967.

Born in Liling county of Hunan province, the son of a schoolteacher, Li studied in France in the early 1920s where, along with Deng Xiaoping and Zhou Enlai, he helped found the French branch of the CCP in 1922.