Li Dazhao

The May Fourth Movement erupted in Beijing in 1919 after the Paris Peace Conference decided to transfer German concessions in Shandong to Japan. Li Dazhao, already chief librarian at Peking University, the epicenter of the New Culture Movement, and an editor of New Youth, was an ideological leader of the student movement. His library office became the planning headquarters for student activists organizing the demonstrations, and by some accounts he personally joined the protest march on 4 May. The movement unleashed a wave of anti-imperialist nationalism and radical political action oriented toward a 'fundamental solution,' pushing many New Culture intellectuals, including Chen Duxiu, to abandon their 'nonpolitical' stance and turn toward revolutionary politics.

In the political ferment of the May Fourth era, Li began the serious organizational work of grounding Marxism in China. In early 1920, when the Comintern agent Grigori Voitinsky arrived in Beijing, Li introduced him to Chen Duxiu in Shanghai, thereby linking the two poles of the emerging Chinese communist movement. After Chen organized a communist cell in Shanghai in May 1920, Li founded a parallel group in Beijing in September–October of the same year. This arrangement, soon known as 'Chen in the South, Li in the North' (南陳北李), became the informal leadership structure of the early party.

Li's most consequential protégé of this period was Mao Zedong, who worked as his library assistant during the winter of 1918–1919. Li introduced Mao to Marxist thought and imparted his own chiliastic faith in the October Revolution and his populist call to go to the countryside. Mao later recalled: 'It was in Beijing that I met a great man whose name was Comrade Li Dazhao. Only with his help did I become a communist. He is truly my teacher' (1949). Li's small study groups became the nucleus of the Chinese Communist Party, formally founded at the First National Congress in Shanghai in July 1921. Li himself was unable to attend the congress due to his work in Beijing, but his student Zhang Guotao represented him.

Li Dazhao's Marxism was an original body of thought distinctly different from orthodox European Marxism. Skeptical of economic determinism and influenced by Bergson and Emerson, he held a voluntaristic worldview in which conscious human action could reshape history. In his 1919 essay "My Marxist Views" (the most systematic treatment of Marxism yet published in Chinese) he expressed reservations about the determinist side of historical materialism while emphasizing class struggle, arguing that ethical and spiritual factors must accompany material transformation.

In the summer of 1919, the liberal intellectual Hu Shi ignited the "Problems and Isms" debate by calling for more study of concrete problems and less talk of abstract doctrines. Li countered that without an "ism" to provide a common direction, no fundamental solution to China's structural crisis was possible. The debate marked a watershed, crystallizing the split between gradualist reform and revolutionary politics among Chinese intellectuals.

Li's other theoretical innovation was his conception of China as a "proletarian nation." He argued that China as a whole, exploited by the imperialist powers, constituted a single proletarian class: a logic that expanded the revolutionary subject beyond the minuscule urban working class to the entire nation. On this basis he believed China could bypass the capitalist stage of development. In his 1919 essay "Youth and the Villages," he issued a populist call for intellectuals to go to the countryside and liberate the peasantry. After the suppression of the Beijing–Hankou Railway strike in 1923 destroyed the CCP's urban labor base, his focus shifted entirely to armed peasant struggle. In a 1926 essay on the Red Spear Societies (traditional peasant secret societies leading rural revolts) he re-evaluated their spontaneous military organization as the main force of revolution. This intellectual trajectory prefigured the rural revolutionary strategy later developed by Mao Zedong.

In 1922, the Comintern formally instructed the fledgling CCP to form a 'united front' with Sun Yat-sen's Kuomintang (KMT). Most CCP leaders, including Chen Duxiu, opposed allying with a bourgeois party, but Li Dazhao became the policy's most ardent advocate. His nationalist-populist worldview predisposed him to a broad national alliance, and in the autumn of 1922 he became the first CCP member to join the KMT as an individual.

In August 1922 in Shanghai, Li met with Sun Yat-sen alongside the Comintern agent Maring. At this meeting Sun accepted the 'bloc within' arrangement, allowing Communists to join the KMT individually. At the KMT's First National Congress in Guangzhou in January 1924, Li was elected to the congress presidium and, facing skeptical KMT delegates, argued that the Communists were joining to support the 'national revolution,' not to subvert the party. Trusted by Sun, he was elected to the KMT's Central Executive Committee.

Li's interpretation of the alliance differed sharply from both Chen Duxiu and the Comintern. Where Chen accepted the 'bourgeois-democratic' stage theory and viewed the alliance as a temporary, tactical necessity before the inevitable proletarian revolution, Li saw the national revolution as a permanent, continuous process. For Li, China as a whole was a 'proletarian nation' engaged in world revolution; the anti-imperialist national revolution and global socialist transformation were a single, seamless current. This voluntaristic and nationalistic conception of revolution departed from Leninist orthodoxy as well as from the more deterministic views of his CCP colleagues, and it provided an important intellectual precedent for Mao Zedong's later theory of New Democracy.