Person1879 – 1942

Chen Duxiu

Also called: Ch’en Tu-hsiu

Founder of the magazine New Youth who led the New Culture Movement under the banner of “democracy and science”, then helped found the Chinese Communist Party and became its first leader

Born at Anqing in Anhui, he turned from the civil examinations to the new learning and studied in Japan several times. After the 1911 Revolution he served in the Anhui military government but fled abroad when the Second Revolution failed. In 1917 he became dean of humanities at Peking University, and during the May Fourth Movement he was arrested for distributing leaflets. As Communist leader he followed the United Front line, stepped down in 1927 bearing the blame for its collapse, and was expelled from the party in 1929 as a Trotskyist. Released from a Nationalist prison in 1937, he died in poverty at Jiangjin in Sichuan.

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3 related events

1
1915 – 1923New Culture Movementleader
Gathered around Chen Duxiu’s New Youth, intellectuals raised the banner of “democracy and science”, attacked Confucian ethics and launched a literature in the vernacular language people actually spoke.
2
1919May Fourth Movementparticipant
When the Paris Peace Conference decided to hand Germany’s former rights in Shandong to Japan, Beijing students demonstrated in front of Tiananmen on 4 May 1919, and an anti-imperialist, anti-warlord movement spread nationwide.
3
1921Founding of the Chinese Communist Partyleader
In July 1921 thirteen delegates met in the French Concession of Shanghai and, with Comintern support, founded the Chinese Communist Party, choosing Chen Duxiu as its leader.

People who appear alongside

Lu Xun1881 – 1936
Leading writer of modern Chinese literature whose vernacular stories “A Madman’s Diary” and “The True Story of Ah Q” sharply criticized old customs and the national character
Mao Zedong1893 – 1976
Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party who won the civil war and founded the People’s Republic in 1949, and launched the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution

Themes this person appears in

Republican China and Imperial Japan1912 – 1949
The age when the Republic of China, born of the 1911 Revolution, passed through warlord division, the May Fourth Movement, the United Front and the Northern Expedition, fought Japan’s invasion and split in civil war — as Japan moved from Taishō democracy through the Manchurian Incident and military coups to the war in China and the Co-Prosperity Sphere, and colonized Korea resisted through the March First Movement and armed struggle