LET.POLI.1919.3".CHEN
Published by Chen Duxiu, Weekly Criticism, China, 1919
* 1879, Huaining county [now Anqing], Anhui province, China, † 1942, Jiangjing, near Chongqing, China
Charge: Participation in May Fourth Movement
《研究室与监狱》陈独秀, 发表于1919年6月8日《每周评论》
世界文明发源地有二：一是科学研究室，一是监狱。我们青年要立志出了研究室就入监狱，出了监狱就入研究室，这才是人生最高尚优美的生活。从这两处发生的文明，才是真正的文明，才是有生命有价值的文明。
The world civilization originates from two places: one is the research room for science, and the other is prison. Our young generation should be determined to go into prison after leaving the research room, and back in the research room after leaving prison. That is the most respectful and beautiful life we are looking for. The real, lively and worthy civilization should only happen in these two places.
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http://www.wenhuacn.com/wenxue/xd_sanwen/chenduxiu/
Chen Duxiu was a leading figure in the anti-imperial Xinhai Revolution and the May Fourth Movement for Science and Democracy. Along with Li Dazhao, Chen was a co-founder of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921. He was its first Chairman and first General Secretary. Chen was an educator, philosopher, and politician. His ancestral home was in Anqing (安慶), Anhui, where he established the influential vernacular Chinese periodical La Jeunesse.
Between 1916 and 1927, in the absence of a strong central power, numerous warlords arose in most parts of the country. When in 1917 Chen was appointed dean of the School of Letters at Peking University, he gathered around him many liberal and progressive professors and students. With their help, he established the short-lived radical Meizhou Pinglun (“Weekly Critic”) in December 1918. Their “new thought” and “new literature” dominated the May Fourth Movement, named after the date of the massive student protests in 1919 against the Chinese government’s weak policy toward Japan and the Shandong resolution of the Versailles Peace Conference, which was going to transfer German rights in China to the Japanese. Because of his prominent role in the movement, however, Chen was forced to resign his post and was imprisoned for three months, from June to September 1919.
The Russian Revolution of 1917 impressed Chen as a way of modernizing an underdeveloped country, and shortly after his release he was converted to Marxism in Shanghai. There, in May 1920, with a handful of followers, Chen founded a communist group and prepared to establish the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). In July 1921 the first representative conference of the CCP was held, and Chen was elected as secretary general. He remained in that post as the party’s undisputed leader for seven years, often regarded as “China’s Lenin.”
In December 1920, in an effort to promote his communist views, Chen accepted the invitation of the rebel military governor of Guangdong province to become head of the education board of the provincial government in Guangzhou (Canton). In the fall of 1922, Chen established the influential Xiangdao Zhoubao (“Guide Weekly”) as a successor to the “New Youth,” which he had converted into a communist organ two years earlier.
After his attendance at the Fourth Congress of the Comintern (the international organization of communist parties) in Moscow in November–December 1922, Chen reluctantly carried out the order of the Comintern to head his party’s collaboration with the Nationalist Party (Kuomintang), founded by Sun Yat-sen. He was elected to that party’s Central Committee in January 1924. A year later, when the Nationalists’ right wing launched its attack on the communists, Chen repeatedly proposed to withdraw en masse from the Nationalist Party but was overruled by the Comintern.
After the collaboration collapsed in 1927, the Comintern blamed Chen for the failure of the alliance with the Nationalists and had him removed from his position of leadership. In November 1929 he was expelled from the party. For several years, with the support of the Chinese Trotskyists and other communist dissenters, he tried to regain influence in the party but failed.
On Oct. 13, 1932, Chen was arrested by the foreign administration of Shanghai, where he had been residing since 1927. Extradited to Nanjing, he was tried and in 1933 sentenced to 15 years in prison by the Nationalist government. After the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War, he was released on parole in August 1937. Chen moved from place to place until the end of July 1938, when he arrived in the wartime capital, Chongqing, where he taught for a while in a junior high school. In poor health and with few friends, he retired to Jiangjing, a small town west of Chongqing, where he died.
A fearless protester, Chen rejected China’s traditional values and saw Marxism as a means to achieve a “mass democracy” with the broad labouring masses as its base. He recognized, however, the significant role played by the bourgeoisie in the Chinese revolution that he hoped to achieve. During the last years of his life, Chen, still a socialist, denounced Joseph Stalin’s dictatorship and defended such democratic institutions as an independent nonpartisan judiciary, opposition parties, the free press, and free elections.
(http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/109115/Chen-Duxiu)