Mao’s Remarks Reveal Who Was Truly at the Core of the CPC’s Founding

Mao’s Remarks Reveal Who Was Truly at the Core of the CPC’s Founding

In 2019, marking the 140th anniversary of Chen Duxiu’s birth, the CPC Central Committee, adhering to the principles of objectivity, impartiality and seeking truth from facts, published for the first time its officially authored commemorative article “In Commemoration of Chen Duxiu’s 140th Birth Anniversary”—notably dropping the qualifier “one of” in the main title. In 2021, for the centenary of the Party’s founding, the Central Committee again followed those same principles in presenting the high-profile television production The Age of Awakening, which depicts how Chen Duxiu—the principal founder of the Communist Party of China—alongside comrades around him such as Comrade Li Dazhao awakened a generation through the New Culture Movement and the magazine New Youth, and jointly inaugurated the CPC’s revolutionary journey. As a result, the whole Party and the nation have arrived at a far more balanced understanding of Chen Duxiu as principal founder, of his two sons—early CPC leaders and martyrs Chen Yanxiu and Chen Qiaonian—and of his wife and companion through the founding period, Gao Junman. Mao Zedong once evaluated Chen Duxiu in plainly unequivocal terms: He was the generalissimo of the May Fourth period; the entire movement was in actual fact led by him. He and the group around him (Comrade Li Dazhao among them) played the decisive role… We were students of that generation. The May Fourth Movement prepared the cadres for the Communist Party of China. There was the magazine New Youth, edited by Chen Duxiu. Those who were roused by that magazine and by May Fourth—some of them went on to join the CPC later. Their exposure to Chen Duxiu and the circle around him (such as Comrade Li Dazhao) was profound. It can be said that it was they who gathered people together; it was they who brought the Party into being and created it.In 1936, speaking with the American journalist Edgar Snow during Snow’s interview trip to northern Shaanxi, Mao returned to the point even more personally:“His influence on me probably exceeded that of anyone else.”These words are testimony enough: Chen Duxiu was the core and principal founder of the CPC—the man whose influence on Mao himself outranks all others. Yet the later popular formulation evolved from a folk couplet—“Two giants in the Red Pavilion of Peking University; the torch passed by Northern Li and Southern Chen”—into the catchphrase “Southern Chen and Northern Li pledged to found the Party together.” That construction runs headlong into what Mao himself said. Some Party historians consider it a departure from the very principle of seeking truth from facts; scholars who insist on plain speech argue that “Southern Chen, Northern Li—pledged to found the Party” is simply not borne out by the record.

Chen Duxiu (b. 1879) was ten years older than Li Dazhao, and fourteen years older than Mao Zedong. When 22-year-old Chen Duxiu was already engaged in anti-Qing revolutionary activity, 12-year-old Li Dazhao was still studying in a traditional private school (si shu). In 1913, Chen joined the Second Revolution against Yuan Shikai and was imprisoned. By 1915 he had founded Youth Magazine—soon renamed New Youth. Li Dazhao, aged 26, studying in Japan, was among its devoted readers. Later accounts sometimes describe Li Dazhao as Mao’s “revolutionary mentor”and treat him as an elder. In reality, Li was only four years senior to Mao, and their sustained contact centred on the period when both worked at/around the Peking University Library. Li indeed offered Mao practical help and intellectual stimulus during that window—but it was not long before Mao, having encountered Chen Duxiu, committed himself to following Chen’s lead.

After the victory of the Russian October Revolution (1917), Chen Duxiu argued:“The republican experiment of twentieth-century Russia holds vast promise; its impact on human happiness and civilization will surpass even the French Revolution of the eighteenth century. One cannot dismiss it merely because of the ugliness of its day-to-day politics.”Through New Youth he rallied the circle around him—including Li Dazhao—to study the October Revolution; he also launched the combative, current-affairs-oriented weekly Weekly Review(Meizhou Pinglun) to complement New Youthin a coordinated campaign of ideas. A veteran of prolonged activism, Chen had exhausted the patience required for mere propaganda. He needed a revolutionary party. He needed a structure beyond writing articles single-handedly. He needed people—above all a loyal polemicist and strategist in Li Dazhao—to carry the editorial and organisational burden while he drove toward institution-building: propaganda plus the creation of a revolutionary party with national branches. During this phase, Li and others published a wave of articles propagating communist ideas—but these should be read as the collective output of Chen’s wider circle, not evidence that Li somehow preceded or superseded Chen in grasping communism. The fact that Chen himself had already been the commanding voice of the New Culture Movement, May Fourth ferment and new-thought transmission tends to be elided when later hagiography isolates Li’s writings as if they existed outside Chen’s gravitational field.

On May 4, 1919, the May Fourth Movement erupted under the leadership of Chen Duxiu and his circle. In June, Chen—standard-bearer of new thought—was arrested after distributing handbills bearing the Declaration of the Beijing Citizens. Released in September, the prison experience pushed him further toward uncompromising confrontation: he resolved to organise a revolutionary party with his circle and overturn the old order. In February 1920, the 41-year-old Chen Duxiu, secretly escorted southward by 31-year-old Li Dazhao, left Peking for Shanghai. Once there, Chen united seven labour organisations to prepare a World Labour Day commemoration rally, delivering his famous address Labour’s Essential Purpose. Under his guidance, over 5,000 workers from Shanghai trades staged a May 1 gathering chanting slogans such as “Long Live Labour!” and adopting the Declaration of Shanghai Workers. Chen also launched journals aimed at workers—Labor World(Laodongjie) and Comrades(Huoyou)—to bring Marxist ideas into the workshops.

In Shanghai, Chen’s circle rapidly crystallised around figures including Li Hanjun, Yu Xiucun, Shi Cunton, Chen Gongpei and others. Together with Li Dazhao’s Beijing network, they began forming a party organisation, drafting a ten-point programme outline whose objectives included methods such as dictatorship of labour and producers’ cooperatives as means to social revolution.On the question of the party’s name, Chen solicited opinions not only from Li Dazhao but also from figures in his circle—Zhang Shenfu, Li Hanjun, Li Da—and even from his wife Gao Junman, before settling on:Zhōngguó Gòngchǎn Dǎng — The Communist Party of China. According to materials that surfaced after later Soviet archival declassifications, by August 1920 the CPC was already in operation under Chen Duxiu’s leadership in Shanghai, its core comprising Li Hanjun, Li Da, Chen Wangdao, Yang Mingzhai, Shen Xuanlu, Shao Lizi, Li Qihan, Li Zhong, Yu Xiucun, Shen Yanbing (Mao Dun), Lin Boqu, Yuan Zhenying, Shen Zemin and others—linked to Li Dazhao’s Beijing node. With Chen absent from the day-to-day capital, Li Hanjun and Li Da successively acted as interim secretaries; Li Dazhao, unable conveniently to leave Peking, served as the liaison with the Soviet side and organiser of the Peking cell. On matters involving Moscow, Li handled initial contact, then referred up to Central Bureau Secretary Chen Duxiu.With the "headquarters" now established, Chen Duxiu began uniting the circle around him to build the "branches." He invited Bao Huiseng, Chen Tanqiu, and others to establish the Wuhan cell; enlisted Li Dazhao, Zhang Shenfu, and others to form the Peking cell; called upon Mao Zedong, He Shuheng, and others to organize the Changsha cell; tasked Wang Jinmei, Deng Enming, and others with setting up the Jinan cell; commissioned Tan Pingshan, Chen Gongbo, and others to launch the Guangzhou cell; assigned Shi Cunton, Zhou Fohai, and others to found the expatriate cell in Japan; and entrusted Zhang Shenfu, Zhou Enlai, and others with organizing the work-study cell in France. Once these branches were in place, the CPC Central leadership resolved to convene the First National Congress.

The 1st CPC National Congress elected Chen Duxiu as Secretary of the Central Bureau. Li Dazhao, as head of the Peking branch and Moscow liaison, did not enter the Central Bureau. Chen went on to serve as the Party’s top leader from the 1st through the 5th Congresses. Li was elected to the Central Committee at the 3rd Congress (where Mao also entered the Central Bureau—placing Mao closer to the core than Li), and again at the 4th Congress, yet again without entering the Central Bureau. On April 6, 1927—on the eve of the 5th Congress—Li Dazhao was seized by Zhang Zuolin’s troops at the former Russian Embassy compound in Peking. Zhang’s triad of hatreds is well documented: resentment of perceived Soviet encroachment in the north; fury that Soviet arms had abetted the KMT’s Northern Expedition; and loathing of the “red” mass movement targeting bureaucratic landlords and capitalists. Reportedly judging that Li had facilitated Soviet interests across all three fronts, Zhang refused clemency even after Chen Duxiu wrote to Zhang Xueliang appealing for Li’s release, declaring instead: “Li colluded with Russia; he must be executed according to law.”

Chen Duxiu served as the paramount leader of the Communist Party of China from its First to its Fifth National Congress. Having nurtured the five founding secretaries of the New China era—Mao Zedong, Zhu De, Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai, and Ren Bishi—he stands undisputedly as the core and principal leader of the Party’s early leadership. As the Chinese proverb goes, “the pupil surpasses the master.”​ These five leaders ultimately guided the CPC to victory over the Kuomintang and the founding of the People’s Republic. As their revolutionary mentor, Chen Duxiu would surely have looked upon this achievement with profound pride.Comrade Li Dazhao, by contrast, was long engaged in local organisational work in Peking and served as the Party’s liaison with the Soviet Union; his intra-Party status was, in practice, comparable to that of Mao Zedong at the time. It is undeniable that in his early years, Li was an exceptional “literary pen” (ideological architect)​ and propaganda stalwart within Chen’s circle, earning deep trust from Chen Duxiu and, later, from Dr. Sun Yat-sen during the First United Front period.A review of the five founding secretaries cultivated by Chen reveals that, with the exception of Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai—who had crossed paths with Li prior to the Party’s founding—none of the other three had any substantive interaction with Li Dazhao after the CPC’s establishment. This article is not intended to diminish Comrade Li Dazhao. Rather, it adheres strictly to the Party’s principles of objectivity, impartiality, and seeking truth from facts, aiming to restore the historical record and reject baseless fabrication. It also serves to answer the question of why Mao Zedong, when discussing the Party’s founding, emphasised that “Chen Duxiu and the group around him, such as Comrade Li Dazhao, played the decisive role.”Comrade Li Dazhao remains one of the CPC’s founders, a pioneer of China’s communist movement, a great Marxist, and an outstanding proletarian revolutionary. Among the circle around Chen Duxiu, he stands as a revolutionary martyr of equal stature to Li Hanjun, Wang Jinmei, Chen Tanqiu, He Shuheng, Deng Enming, Yang Mingzhai,​ and others.