New Biography of “China’s First Communist” Reveals Nuances for English-Speaking Readers

As a college student, Li would come to “embrace modern values” and transformed himself into a “globally oriented intellectual.” Like many of his republican-aligned classmates, he “shared [the prevailing] mood of absorbing new cultural elements” from many international sources (35). These included cultural and philosophical concepts from Russia, Germany, and France; political theory from the United States and United Kingdom; and a modernization agenda funneled through Japan. In this early period, Li emphasized the value of constitutionalism and U.S.-style democratic processes to achieve China’s “national salvation.” He initially supported the despot Yuan Shikai, believing Yuan would enhance the country’s internal political and cultural life. Despite idealizing Western political theory, Li constantly adapted it to specific Chinese contexts, using Chinese cultural values to modulate its contours. Li’s interest in Western thought, including his later interest in Marxism, was driven by patriotism and the project of national liberation.

Chapters three and four cover Li’s study in Japan, his break with Yuan, and his deepening involvement with the New Culture Movement in China. At Tokyo’s Waseda University, Li studied numerous Western thinkers, deepened his involvement in the Chinese nationalist movement, and led student protests against Japan’s infamous twenty-one demands, which sought to enhance its imperialist control over portions of China (66). He also became increasingly disillusioned with President Yuan, who appeared to be colluding with Japanese imperialists. Li developed a political theory of democratic reform around the principle that it held the key to recovering the country’s sovereignty and autonomous economic and cultural development. Yuan seemed exclusively focused on securing his power and claiming the title of emperor, and he did so through Tokyo’s support. Shan suggests that Li and his friends may have developed a secret “revolutionary coterie aimed at toppling Yuan, defending republicanism and revitalizing China” (68). While this group fell apart after Yuan’s forced resignation from office, it gave Li a taste of revolutionary organizing.

Li’s involvement with student radicalism in Japan led to his dismissal from Waseda University in 1916. He returned to Beijing via Shanghai and began a brief career as an editor. During this time, he called for an optimistic outlook within the New Culture Movement, debating other well-known radicals and progressives, such as future CPC founder Chen Duxiu and cultural icon Hu Shi. He modified his advocacy of constitutionalism with the notion of “people’s sovereignty” and applied “traditional Chinese cultural resources to interpret Western democratic concepts” (73). In addition to his support for a constitutional process, Li wrote about the revolutionary role of the people in making history. He regarded political action—confrontation with the forces of imperialism, dictatorship, and warlordism—as a pillar of China’s process of renewal. He specifically reached out to the youth movement of “Young China” as a critical resource for this political struggle and helped inspire its commitment to a cultural renaissance.

Shan’s discussion of the simultaneous development of Li’s cultural analysis, his deepening radical approaches to people’s democracy, and his strategic realism is nuanced and revealing. As an editor with this developing new perspective, Li bounced from job to job as the political winds and the main political forces shifted during the First World War. Li edited three different periodicals, usually affiliated with one or another political faction on the nationalist side. During the war, Li had strategically supported China’s involvement as a means to recover the German concessions. When U.S. President Woodrow Wilson allowed Japan to gain control of those concessions and refused to acknowledge China’s right to national self-determination, Li’s idealistic perception of the Western system withered. By the time of his appointment at the Beijing University Library in 1918, Li was a radical nationalist, though he still held no membership card with the Kuomintang (KMT). Shan also concludes that Li’s writings do not yet suggest a solid connection to theoretical Marxism, but the 29-year-old’s political shift to the radical left is quite evident.

Securing the library’s directorship and a teaching post enabled Li to acquire a steady income and scholarly credentials. The fifth chapter explores Li’s academic work, especially his role in transforming the library, along with his “swift march toward communism” (131). While Li was not a professional librarian, his meticulous organizing skills, interest in international concepts, and democratic politics influenced how he re-envisioned the library’s educational function. Traditionally, Chinese libraries served to protect books from public use. By adopting Western techniques, Li made the library more accessible to faculty and students. He built reading rooms, developed classification and catalog systems based on what he had observed in Japan, and made significant purchases of foreign-published publications for the collection. He transformed the Beijing University library into “the destination of visitors who respected it as an important center for disseminating information” (110). Through his scholarly research and teaching, Li explored topics in history, economics, and politics.

Academic activities were not the sole domain of Li’s writing and work. He organized and led student and faculty protests against the Treaty of Versailles, which conceded Chinese territory and sovereignty to foreign imperialism. The library’s offices served as the headquarters of what came to be called the May Fourth Movement. He and his cohort of followers, including the assistant librarian Mao Zedong, organized several critical student-faculty organizations that would be foundational for future left-wing activism. Shan also documents Li’s innovative ideas that closely connected the May Fourth Movement with Young China and the New Cultural Movement. Of Li’s role as a political leader during the May Fourth Movement, Shan writes, “Li participated, Li led, and Li acted valiantly” (125).

Shan explores and discusses Li’s early Marxist thought to explain that “the Chinese people’s acceptance of communism” was essentially rooted in their “efforts to integrate this imported ideology into their own cultural setting” (133). Li’s personal role in this activity followed the larger pattern among Chinese liberals and radicals of adopting many of the world’s political and cultural currents. Few completely abandoned their own identities in the process of discovering and embracing these new ideas. For his part, Li was motivated entirely by his rejection of Western imperialism, his enthusiasm for China’s autonomous economic development, and, by now, a radical democratic theory rooted in the people’s sovereignty. He saw warlordism, the carving up of the country’s various regions under militaristic control, as an imperialist stratagem that had to be uprooted.

In the aftermath of the war, Li wrote at least thirty articles analyzing and applauding the Russian Revolution, identifying it as “the twinkling star” of humanity’s future hope (136). His most famous article, titled “My Marxist View,” elaborated on fundamental Marxist principles, including historical materialism, surplus value, class conflict, and primary economic determination of capitalist society. He concluded that imperialism had forced China into a condition of being a proletarian subordinate to Japan, Europe, and the United States. Shan adds that Li’s analysis discussed these topics “without showing any sign of a quasi-religious fanaticism” (139). He adapted Marxist thought to Chinese conditions, describing how concepts like morality and gender roles had been socially constructed within the social relations of production. Like his compatriots in the New Culture Movement, Li felt no obligation to orthodox ideas and welcomed communism as decisive for China’s renewal.

At this time, Li’s role in organizing student movements, study groups, and labor unions was accompanied by the organization of revolutionary cells that would become the basis for the northern section of China’s Communist Party. Shan busts several myths about the origins of the CPC and notes that Li founded the party on a program of action designed to empower the working class and peasants. The role of the Comintern in providing financial aid, along with Li’s leading role as mediator between the Comintern and the party, was crucial in these early days. Claims that Li and the CPC were simply tools of the Comintern and the USSR’s “Red Imperialism” are based on political biases rather than actual evidence, Shan discloses. Moscow had already relinquished its Chinese concessions that had been seized by the tsar and held by the Alexander Kerensky government. Internationalism and an anti-imperialist agenda were the primary motives on each side.

The final two chapters detail the last five years of Li’s life. Once the CPC had been founded, Li carried out the Comintern’s appeal for a united front with Sun Yat-sen’s KMT. Up until his death in 1925, Sun retained leadership of the KMT, but Western powers found more favorable allies among the warlords and abandoned Sun. Li cultivated a close amity with the nationalist leader, who adopted an amicable stance towards the Soviet Union and the CPC. Li personally oversaw the establishment of friendly diplomatic relations between the Soviet government and the KMT (despite the organization’s right-wing resistance). Li urged CPC members to join the KMT as individuals while retaining their political identities. The Comintern shared Li’s view that this move was necessary for establishing the First United Front, considering it the decisive catalyst for defeating the warlordism that enabled foreign aggression. Shan emphasizes that the evidence shows that the United Front policy was debated and accepted on CPC terms because it aligned with the concrete circumstances. Scholars who frame it solely as imposed by outside forces overstate the case.

After the party’s founding, Li set aside most academic work and attended primarily to the party’s organization, the student groups, labor unions (including a faculty union at Beijing University), and an impressive number of peasant organizations. Although neither the CPC nor the KMT in Beijing matched the size and influence of either party’s South China sections, Li oversaw the growth of the CPC to more than three thousand members. His comrades organized peasant associations that totaled as many as three hundred thousand rural residents. Sun’s death in 1925 held tragic consequences for the United Front, as the KMT’s anti-Communist right wing moved to expel many leftists. Still, Li’s strategic organizing in the foreign-owned railways and mining operations led to strike activity with an inherently anti-imperialist flavor. Strikes and massive popular protests, including a gigantic rally of one hundred thousand supporters of the national revolution on Tiananmen Square, challenged the Beijing warlord Duan Qirui’s rule and aligned popular opinion with the United Front’s military push northward.

As the situation in the north grew increasingly dangerous, many of Li’s comrades encouraged him to head south, where relatively safer conditions prevailed. Li refused, citing the need to weaken the northern warlords and build mass protests against the undemocratic regime in Beijing. Shan documents Li’s calculated relations with key military figures, which promoted divisions among the warlords and strengthened the strategic military conditions on the ground, thus aiding the Northern Expedition’s successes after Li’s execution in 1927. For the final year of his life, Li was forced to take refuge in the Soviet embassy in Beijing, along with a handful of comrades and family members. Warlord and Japanese collaborator Zhang Zuolin, ambitious to elevate himself as China’s dictator, discovered Li’s hiding place and ordered a force of three hundred police and guards to storm illegally the embassy and arrest Li and his cohort. Found guilty of espionage by a secret military court based on falsified evidence, Li was hanged twenty-one days later.

Li Dazhao substantially contributes to English-language scholarship on China’s early revolutionary period. Shan unearths and compiles compelling archival and historiographic evidence about Li’s leadership role in building the CPC and the United Front. He oversaw the organizing successes in the northern provinces that facilitated the triumphant reunification of China under a republican government. Shan suggests that many political theories later attributed to Mao may have originated in Li’s writings and speeches. Readers can trace China’s revolutionary development through this account of Li’s work and life. From the earliest moments of its national democratic revolution, we witness the re-foundation of the country’s popular democratic culture, the establishment of the Communist Party, a Marxist revolutionary theory relevant to China’s complex, multi-ethnic society, and the subsequent civil struggle for a unified nationalist movement against imperialism. The book encapsulates not only the life of an individual, but also the narrative of China’s national renaissance in the early republic.