Li Dazhao
Li Dazhao was a Chinese intellectual, revolutionary, and political activist who co-founded the Chinese Communist Party with Chen Duxiu in 1921. He was one of the first Chinese intellectuals to publicly support Bolshevism and the October Revolution, and his writings and mentorship inspired a generation of young radicals, including Mao Zedong.
Born to a peasant family in Hebei province, Li was educated in modern schools in China and later at Waseda University in Japan. He rose to prominence during the New Culture Movement as the chief librarian and a professor of history at Peking University. In this role, he influenced many student activists and transformed his office into a hub for Marxist discussion. After the May Fourth Movement of 1919, he helped organize some of China's first communist study groups.
Li adapted Marxism to the Chinese context, emphasizing the revolutionary potential of the peasantry and developing a voluntaristic interpretation that stressed the role of conscious political action over strict economic determinism. He theorized that China, as a nation oppressed by imperialism, constituted a "proletarian nation" capable of bypassing a full capitalist stage of development. An ardent nationalist, Li was a key architect of the First United Front between the CCP and Sun Yat-sen's Kuomintang, arguing that a cross-class national revolution was necessary to defeat imperialism and warlordism.
As the political situation in northern China deteriorated, Li's focus shifted decisively to armed peasant revolt. After the Manchurian warlord Zhang Zuolin seized Beijing, Li took refuge in the Soviet embassy. In a raid on the embassy in April 1927, he was captured by Zhang's forces and executed by hanging. He is honored in CCP historiography as one of the party's founders and a principal revolutionary martyr.
Early life and education
Li Dazhao was born on 29 October 1889, in Daheituo Village, Laoting County, Hebei province. His family were peasants who had accumulated enough capital through trade to become small village landlords. Li was orphaned at a young age; his father died before he was born, and his mother died when he was just over a year old. He was raised by his great-uncle, Li Ruzhen, whom he called grandfather, who ensured he received a traditional education in the Confucian classics. In 1899, in accordance with his grandfather's wish to secure a caretaker for him, the ten-year-old Li was married to the seventeen-year-old Zhao Renlan, to whom he remained devoted for the rest of his life.In 1905, Li passed the county-level examination and enrolled in a modern middle school in Yongpingfu. That same year, the Qing dynasty abolished the traditional imperial examination system, closing the centuries-old path for scholars to enter the state bureaucracy. For Li's generation, a Western-style education became the preferred alternative to a classical one. After graduating in 1907, he enrolled at the Peiyang College of Law and Political Science in Tianjin. He studied there for six years, majoring in political economy and developing a strong desire for a life of public service and political action.
During his time in Tianjin, Li was inspired by the Xinhai Revolution of 1911 but quickly grew disillusioned with the political chaos of the new Republic under Yuan Shikai. He became a student leader in a local movement petitioning for constitutional reform in 1910 and joined the Chinese Socialist Party in 1912. His early political thought was an uncertain mixture of Western liberal constitutional theory and traditional Confucian moral precepts, marked by a populist belief in "the people" as a unified entity whose natural freedom was threatened by the state. Deeply frustrated by the corruption of the new republic, in the summer of 1913 he briefly considered retreating into a Buddhist monastic sect.
Study in Japan and early nationalism
With financial assistance from the constitutionalist politician Tang Hualong, Li left for Tokyo in September 1913 to study political economy at Waseda University. While in Japan, he participated in student political groups opposed to Yuan Shikai's increasingly dictatorial regime in China.Li's nationalist sentiments intensified dramatically in 1915, when Japan presented its imperialistic Twenty-One Demands to the Chinese government. He became a leader among Chinese students in Japan protesting the demands, authoring a long manifesto, "A Letter of Admonition to the Elders of the Nation," that was sent to the government in Beijing. In these essays, Li's nationalism took on a chauvinistic tone, exalting China's traditional superiority while attributing its modern plight to foreign influence. This antiforeign sentiment was coupled with a sense of national shame, as Li argued that the Chinese themselves were responsible for their nation's weakness.
During his time in Japan, Li was exposed to a wide range of Western philosophies. The thought of Henri Bergson and Ralph Waldo Emerson had a profound impact on his intellectual development. In a 1915 exchange with Chen Duxiu, Li criticized what he saw as Chen's pessimism and argued, based on Bergson's concept of free will, that individuals with conscious purpose could actively shape reality. Influenced by Emerson's optimistic transcendentalism, Li developed this activist philosophy into a metaphysical worldview in his 1916 essay "Spring". He presented a dialectical view of history in which the decay and death of the old inevitably contained the seeds of rebirth. He argued that China, though ancient and seemingly moribund, was on the verge of a national regeneration, a rebirth into a "young China" that would emerge from the "corpse" of its old civilization. This rebirth, he insisted, depended on the conscious actions of China's youth in the present.
Armed with this philosophy, Li became impatient with his exile and eager to return to the political struggles in China. In April 1916, as Yuan Shikai's regime began to collapse, he returned to China. He was formally expelled from Waseda University for his long absence, having become deeply involved in the anti-Yuan movement.
Return to China and the New Culture Movement
Upon his return to China in 1916, Li briefly plunged into parliamentary politics in Beijing as an associate of Tang Hualong and the Progressive Party. He quickly became disillusioned with the opportunism of the politicians, who sought alliances with the dominant Peiyang warlords. He broke with the Progressive Party in October 1916, convinced that constitutional government was unworkable in the warlord era. By late 1917, he had concluded that China's political crisis could not be solved without a revolution.Frustrated with politics, Li was drawn to the circle of "nonpolitical" intellectuals around Chen Duxiu and the journal New Youth, the leading organ of the New Culture Movement. In January 1918, Li formally joined the New Youth editorial board. The following month, at the invitation of Cai Yuanpei, the reformist chancellor of Peking University, Li was appointed chief librarian of the university, where Chen Duxiu was serving as dean of letters. In his capacity as librarian and later as a professor of history and economics, Li exerted a significant influence on student radicals. His reforms professionalized the library, making it a center for disseminating new ideas. His young library assistant during the winter of 1918–1919 was Mao Zedong, whom Li introduced to Marxist thought.
Conversion to Marxism
Influence of the Russian Revolution
Li Dazhao was the first major Chinese intellectual to declare his support for the October Revolution in Russia. While other New Culture intellectuals, such as Chen Duxiu, welcomed the democratic February Revolution as a victory for the Allied cause in World War I, Li was skeptical of Western democracy and had little sympathy for the Allies. He saw the events in Russia as a harbinger of a new wave of global revolution. In an article in July 1918, he hailed the October Revolution as a fundamental break with the past, representing a new spirit of "humanism" and internationalism that surpassed the narrow patriotism of the French Revolution.Li's interpretation was infused with his pre-Marxist philosophy of rebirth. He argued that Russia's economic backwardness was a positive advantage, providing it with "surplus energy" for radical transformation, whereas the advanced Western nations were in a state of decay. This view, which bore similarities to Leon Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution, confirmed Li's own belief that China, being even more backward, was poised for a similar revolutionary leap. In his highly influential article "The Victory of Bolshevism", he proclaimed that the Russian Revolution marked the beginning of a worldwide class war and an irresistible tide of global transformation. He declared that the age of capitalism and imperialism was coming to an end, and that "every place in the world will see the victorious flag of Bolshevism and hear the triumphal song of Bolshevism." Li's response to the revolution was deeply emotional and chiliastic; he saw it as the realization of the millennium in the present, an elemental force that was transforming the entire world order.
Populist ideas and "Youth and the Villages"
Following his enthusiastic embrace of Bolshevism, Li began to earnestly study Marxism. In late 1918, he organized the first Marxist study group at Peking University, which met secretly in his library office, soon known as the "Red Chamber". As his messianic hopes for imminent world revolution were tempered by the political realities in Europe and China, Li began to search for concrete ways to end the social isolation of the Chinese intelligentsia. His solution was a turn to the peasantry, inspired by the example of the 19th-century Russian Populist movement.In a series of articles published in February 1919 under the title "Youth and the Villages", Li issued a populist call for China's young intellectuals to go to the countryside to liberate the peasantry. He argued that "China is a rural nation and most of the laboring class is made up of peasants. If they are not liberated, then our whole nation will not be liberated." The urban intellectuals, he declared, had a duty to go to the villages, "unite with the laboring classes," and awaken the peasants from their political stupor. This would not only save the nation but also rescue the intellectuals themselves from the corrupting life of the cities, which he described as "the life of the devil". This populist strain, with its faith in the spontaneous revolutionary energy of the peasants and its anti-urban bias, represented a significant innovation in modern Chinese revolutionary strategy and deeply influenced Li's interpretation of Marxism.