About the Book

Chen Duxiu (1879-1942) founded the Chinese Communist Party in 1921, after a revolutionary career in the movement that overthrew the Manchus and brought in the Republic. Between 1915 and 1919, he led the remarkable New Culture Movement that electrified student youth and laid the intellectual foundations for modern China. In 1929, he helped found the Chinese Trotskyist Opposition, which he then led. In 1932 he went to prison for seeking to overthrow the government. Between his release in 1937 and his death in 1942, he wrote the letters and articles collected in this volume.
Best known as a revolutionary, Chen Duxiu was also a poet, writer, educator and linguist, and modern China's boldest and most independent-minded thinker. Although a giant of Chinese politics and letters and a seminal influence on Mao Zedong's generation of revolutionaries, for decades after his conversion to Trotskyism, his name was blackened and his achievements were concealed.