Activities and affiliations

Political and party leadership Communist Party of China 1879–1942 ○ Natural causes

The New Culture revolutionary who founded the CCP and led it for six years

“Only science and democracy — these two gentlemen we must take as our teachers.” — New Youth

Principal founder of the Chinese Communist Party and its first General Secretary (1921–1927). He spearheaded the New Culture Movement through the journal New Youth. Dismissed by the Comintern after the collapse of the First United Front, he later embraced Trotskyism.

Political and party leadership Communist Party of China 1889–1927 ✕ Executed

The Peking University librarian who first embraced Marxism in China and nurtured the generation of Mao Zedong

In 'The Victory of Bolshevism' (November 1918): "Look! Every place in the world will see the victorious flag of Bolshevism and hear the triumphal song of Bolshevism. (…) From this day onward, this is no longer a world of the bourgeoisie, of capitalism, of imperialism. It is a world of labor, a world of Bolshevism!"

Pioneer of Chinese Marxism and co-founder of the CCP. As Peking University librarian he introduced Marxism to Mao Zedong and led the May Fourth Movement, championing the Russian Revolution. He architected the United Front and was executed by warlord Zhang Zuolin in 1927.

Political and party leadership Communist Party of China 1897–1979 ↓ Removed 1938 · natural causes

Chair of the founding congress who split with Mao on the Long March and defected to the Nationalists

At the 1935 Long March reunion he insisted on turning south to Sichuan rather than north to Shaanxi. Losing over 75% of his 80,000 troops discredited him in his army and Comintern.

A Peking University student leader in May Fourth, he chaired the party’s founding congress in 1921. After years of labour organising he went to the Eyuwan Soviet in 1931 and became political leader of the Fourth Front Army, which met Mao’s Central Red Army in Sichuan on the Long March in 1935. Clashing with Mao over marching north or west, he set up a rival “centre” and turned south, lost much of his army, and rejoined at Yan’an in 1936. Criticised in 1937, he fled to the Nationalist zone in 1938 and was expelled; he later wrote his memoirs in Hong Kong and Canada and died in Toronto.

Political and party leadership Communist Party of China 1899–1935 ✕ Executed

Marxist literary critic who first sang The Internationale in Chinese, and party leader in 1927

18 June 1935, a small hill in Changting's Zhongshan Park. Facing the firing squad, Qu Qiubai sat down on the grass, smiled at the executioner and said, "Right here is fine!" He died singing The Internationale.

A leading intellectual of the May Fourth generation, Qu learned Russian and became one of the first Chinese correspondents to report on Bolshevik Russia from Moscow. Returning in 1923, he succeeded Chen Duxiu as de facto leader of the CCP, directing an insurrectionary line that included the Guangzhou Uprising, and served on the Comintern Executive Committee Presidium. After his political fall, he co-led the League of Left-Wing Writers with Lu Xun and Mao Dun, laying the foundations of Marxist literary theory in China and translating Russian and Soviet literature: most enduringly The Internationale into Chinese. Arrested by the Kuomintang in 1935, he was executed in Changting, singing The Internationale on the way to his death.

Political and party leadership Communist Party of China 1899–1967 ✕ Removed 1930 · suicide

Labour organiser whose 1930 urban-insurrection “Li Lisan line” led the party and cost him his position

Labour organiser in the CCP and director of its Central Committee, March to August 1930.

From Hunan, he joined the party while a work-study student in France and organised the Anyuan miners’ strike of 1922 and the May Thirtieth Movement of 1925. From 1928 he held effective control of the Central Committee and in 1930, declaring a revolutionary high tide, ordered attacks on Changsha, Wuhan and other cities that failed; condemned by the Comintern, he was removed and summoned to Moscow, where he stayed fifteen years and married a Soviet wife. He returned in 1946 and served as labour minister. Persecuted early in the Cultural Revolution, he killed himself in 1967 and was rehabilitated in 1980.

Political and party leadership Communist Party of China 1900–1976 ↓ Removed 1959 · heart attack

A “28 Bolsheviks” returnee who became general secretary after Zunyi and sided with Peng Dehuai at Lushan in 1959

One of the “28 Bolsheviks” who replaced Bo Gu as general secretary after Zunyi, he backed Peng Dehuai at Lushan in 1959 and died in Wuxi in 1976.

A Sun Yat-sen University graduate counted among the “28 Bolsheviks”, he backed Mao against Bo Gu at the Zunyi Conference in 1935 and became the party’s general secretary. He led propaganda and theory at Yan’an and ceded real power to Mao after the rectification movement. After 1949 he was ambassador to Moscow and vice-minister of foreign affairs; at the 1959 Lushan Conference he criticised the Great Leap and was purged with Peng Dehuai as an “anti-party clique”. Exiled during the Cultural Revolution, he died of heart disease in 1976 and was rehabilitated in 1979.

Political and party leadership Communist Party of China 1904–1950 ○ Cerebral haemorrhage

The organiser among Yan’an’s five secretaries, dead a year after the People’s Republic was founded

Back in Yan'an from 1940, he worked in the Secretariat and Organisation Department; the 1945 Seventh Congress made him a Politburo Standing Committee member behind Mao Zedong, Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai and Zhu De. He died of a stroke in Beijing on 27 October 1950.

From Hunan, he studied at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East in Moscow and led the Communist Youth League. On the Long March he commanded the Second Front Army with He Long, and as the party’s delegate to the Comintern in 1938 he helped win recognition of Mao’s leadership. From 1943 he ran party organisation and finance as a Secretariat member, one of the “five secretaries” with Mao, Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai and Zhu De. His health failed after 1949 and he died of a cerebral haemorrhage in 1950 at 46.

Political and party leadership Communist Party of China 1904–1974 ○ Died

Leader of the "28 Bolsheviks" and Mao Zedong's foremost political rival

During the 1932 Shanghai Incident, Wang declared China faced "a struggle between two nations — the newborn Chinese Soviet Republic and the rotten Republic of China," calling this confrontation "the core of the total of the current Chinese political life."

The leading figure of the "28 Bolsheviks" trained at Moscow's Sun Yat-sen University, he imported a Comintern-loyal dogmatic line and led the early CCP's Moscow-aligned leadership. He was Mao Zedong's strongest rival, targeted in Mao's essays "On Practice" and "On Contradiction" and purged in the 1942 Rectification Movement as the symbol of dogmatism.

Political and party leadership Communist Party of China 1907–1946 ✕ Killed in crash

The CCP's young General Secretary who represented the Comintern line and later built the Party's press apparatus

During the Rectification Movement, he confessed: "I caused such great damage to the Party — no matter how hard I work, I can never make up for this loss." He added: "I am the person most responsible for all the disastrous consequences — here there is no 'one of.'"

General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (1931–1935), Bo Gu led the Party through the Jiangxi Soviet period and the early Long March. A member of the '28 Bolsheviks' trained at Moscow's Sun Yat-sen University, he represented the Comintern's left line alongside Wang Ming. After being ousted by Mao Zedong at the Zunyi Conference, he served as head of the Organization Department, director of Xinhua News Agency, and editor-in-chief of Liberation Daily, laying the institutional foundations of the CCP's press and propaganda apparatus. He died in a plane crash in 1946 while returning to Yan'an from the Chongqing negotiations.