Chen Duxiu


Chen Duxiu

or

Ch'en Tu-hsiu

(both: chŭn do͞o-shyo͞o), 1879–1942, Chinese educator and Communist party leader. He was active in the republican revolution of 1911 and was forced to flee to Japan after taking part in the abortive "second revolution" of 1913 against Yüan Shih-kaiYüan Shih-kai
, 1859–1916, president of China (1912–16). From 1885 to 1894 he was the Chinese resident in Korea, then under Chinese suzerainty. He supported the dowager empress, Tz'u Hsi, against the reform movement (1898) of Emperor Kuang Hsü, and she
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. In 1915 he founded the journal New Youth in Shanghai. Articles by Ch'en, Li DazhaoLi Dazhao
, 1888–1927, professor of history and librarian at Beijing Univ., cofounder of the Chinese Communist party with Chen Duxiu. He was the first important Chinese intellectual to support the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.
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, Hu ShihHu Shih
, 1891–1962, Chinese philosopher and essayist, leading liberal intellectual in the May Fourth Movement (1917–23). He studied under John Dewey at Columbia Univ., becoming a lifelong advocate of pragmatic evolutionary change.
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, and others encouraged Chinese youth to create a new culture free from Confucianism. He was dean of the school of arts and sciences of Beijing Univ. from Jan., 1917, until forced to resign under conservative pressure in Mar., 1919. Ch'en was converted to Marxism in the period following the student-led intellectual revolution known as the May Fourth MovementMay Fourth Movement
(1919), first mass movement in modern Chinese history. On May 4, about 5,000 university students in Beijing protested the Versailles Conference (Apr. 28, 1919) awarding Japan the former German leasehold of Kiaochow (Jiaozhou), Shandong prov.
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 (1919). He founded (1920) two Marxist groups, and in 1921 representatives of these groups met with representatives of groups organized by Li Dazhao (neither Chen nor Li were present) to found the Communist party. He was dismissed from party leadership and withdrew from the party in 1927 over his opposition to the CominternComintern
[acronym for Communist International], name given to the Third International, founded at Moscow in 1919. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin feared a resurgence of the Second, or Socialist, International under non-Communist leadership.
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-ordered policy of armed insurrection.