Li Li-San

(Li Min-jan). Born 1896 in the district of Liling, in the province of Hunan. A prominent figure in the Communist Party of China.

From 1919 to 1921, Li Li-san studied and worked in France, where he joined a cell of the Communist Party of China (CPC). From 1922 to 1925 he engaged in underground operations in Anyuang and Shanghai. He was elected to the Executive Committee of the Red International of Trade Unions at its congress in Moscow in 1925. In 1927 he became a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China. In late 1929 and in 1930 he was the de facto head of the party, occupying left-opportunist positions (when the revolutionary movement in China began to decline, he called for the immediate organization of armed insurrections in the cities and for drawing the USSR into the war against Japan). In October 1930 the Executive Committee of the Comintern sent the Central Committee of the CPC a letter with extensive criticism of the Li Li-san line. The Fourth Plenum of the Central Committee of the CPC (January 1931) condemned the leftist course of Li Li-san. From 1931 to 1945 he lived in the USSR. In 1945 he became a member of the Northeast Bureau of the Central Committee of the CPC. He then was deputy chairman of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (1948–53) and minister of labor of the People’s Republic of China (1949–54). At the Ninth Congress of the CPC in 1969 he was not elected to the Central Committee of the CPC.