Chen Duxiu: The Founder Who Was Expelled From His Own Party
"Critics accuse this magazine of intending to destroy Confucianism," Chen Duxiu wrote in the pages of New Youth. "These charges are conceded." Few editorial statements in modern Chinese history have been so bluntly self-implicating, and none did more to detonate the intellectual world Chen inhabited. He co-founded the Chinese Communist Party, served as its first General Secretary, and was expelled from it eight years later — a trajectory that makes him one of the few figures central to two incompatible chapters of twentieth-century Chinese history: the birth of Chinese Communism and the birth of the opposition to it.
A Scholar Bred for the System He Rejected
Born on 9 October 1879 in Anqing, Anhui, into a gentry family, Chen lost his father at two and was raised by a wealthy uncle. He excelled within the traditional examination system, placing first in his district's imperial xiucai examination in 1896, before attending Hangzhou's Qiushi Academy — where he was expelled for anti-government activism — and then studying in Japan from 1902 to 1909, immersing himself in revolutionary student politics abroad. The pattern was set early: formal brilliance inside inherited institutions, followed by active rebellion against them.
New Youth and the New Culture Movement
In 1915 Chen founded what became New Youth magazine, which the Asia Society's history of the period describes as "one of the most influential publications for young radicals" of the era, drawing in contributors including Lu Xun, Li Dazhao, and, as a young reader and eventual writer, Mao Zedong himself. As Dean of the School of Arts and Letters at Peking University from 1917, Chen led the broader New Culture Movement's assault on Confucian tradition, championing what he called "Mr. Science and Mr. Democracy" as the twin forces that would rescue China from feudal stagnation, and pushing for vernacular Chinese to replace classical literary language as the vehicle of serious thought. Unlike Sun Yat-sen, who favored a period of political tutelage before full democracy, Chen argued for democratic practice immediately — a position that reflected both intellectual conviction and impatience with gradualism.
Arrested for May Fourth
When the May Fourth protests erupted on 4 May 1919 against the Allied powers' decision to transfer former German concessions in Shandong to Japan rather than return them to China, Chen was an active supporter, and he was arrested on 11 June 1919 while distributing leaflets, spending 83 days in prison on charges connected to publishing Bolshevik materials. The episode radicalized him further, pushing him from cultural criticism toward organized political action.
Founding the Chinese Communist Party
Chen co-founded the Chinese Communist Party with Li Dazhao in 1921, after establishing a Shanghai Communist cell with seven members the previous year following contact with Comintern representative Grigori Voitinsky. He served as the party's first General Secretary from 1921 to 1927, initially resisting Comintern direction before accepting the financial support and strategic guidance that came with it, including a reluctant, Comintern-mandated alliance with the Kuomintang — the First United Front — that Chen warned repeatedly, and correctly, was dangerous given Chiang Kai-shek's ambitions. When Chiang turned on the Communists in the April 1927 Shanghai Massacre, Chen had received contradictory instructions from Moscow throughout the crisis; the CCP nonetheless removed him as General Secretary that August and made him the scapegoat for the United Front's collapse, condemning him for "right-wing opportunism" despite the Comintern's own responsibility for the strategy.
Trotskyism and Expulsion
In the aftermath, Chen encountered Leon Trotsky's critique of Comintern strategy in China through returning students, and it resonated with his own conclusions about the party's mistakes. He organized an opposition faction advocating independent party leadership and mass democratic engagement, and adopted Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution. The CCP Central Committee condemned his "residual opportunism" in mid-1929 and formally expelled him on 15 November 1929 after he refused to renounce Trotskyism. He went on to lead China's small Trotskyist movement, chairing a unified Left Opposition congress in Shanghai in 1931.
Imprisonment and a Quiet Final Chapter
Kuomintang secret police, tipped off, arrested Chen on 15 October 1932 at the Trotskyist congress. Tried in 1933, he was sentenced to thirteen years — a death sentence commuted under public pressure — and received relatively favorable prison conditions that allowed him to continue linguistic scholarship and begin an autobiography. Released nine years early, in August 1937, following the formation of the Second United Front against Japan, Chen sought re-entry to the CCP; Mao would readmit him only on condition he renounce Trotskyism and confess past errors, terms Chen rejected. He spent his final years in Jiangjin, Sichuan, working on an etymological dictionary aimed at Chinese-language romanization, and, in the assessment of his old New Culture ally Hu Shi, underwent a "late-in-life reconversion to democracy" as he watched Stalinist authoritarianism unfold abroad. He died on 27 May 1942, at 62, of high blood pressure and heart disease.
Why Chen Is Called a Genius
Chen's claim rests on documented intellectual achievement rather than survival or manipulation, which sets him apart from several of his political contemporaries. He built and edited the single most influential radical magazine of his generation, shaped the intellectual vocabulary — "Mr. Science and Mr. Democracy" — that an entire generation of Chinese reformers used to frame the country's crisis, and did so with what scholars have called genuine "stylistic brilliance." Historian Lee Feigon's study pushes back on the simpler label of "Westernizer," arguing Chen's impact came from deep immersion in Chinese tradition even as he attacked its oppressive elements — describing him as "a Mandarin of the new culture," fluent enough in the system he opposed to dismantle it credibly from within. Feigon's more skeptical comparison is instructive too: he likens Chen to Moses, a leader who could point the way to a "promised land" he was not destined to enter, "lacking the organizational ruthlessness of a Lenin or a Mao." That is the honest limit of Chen's genius — it was interpretive and rhetorical, not organizational or tactical, and it is precisely the trait that let rivals with harder political instincts outmaneuver and then erase him from the movement he founded.
Legacy
Official Communist Party historiography long minimized Chen as an "arch-renegade," but scholarship since the 1980s has substantially rehabilitated his standing, crediting him with a "profound influence on the course of modern Chinese history" that runs through both the Communist movement he helped found and the democratic and literary traditions that later generations of Chinese intellectuals have claimed as his truer heirs.
