Chen Duxiu

When Chen Duxiu launched Youth Magazine (renamed New Youth in 1916) in Shanghai in September 1915, he created far more than a periodical. His opening essay, 'Call to Youth,' summoned a new generation, 'independent, progressive, cosmopolitan, utilitarian, and scientific', and struck a deep chord among young Chinese disillusioned with the old order. In 1917, Cai Yuanpei appointed Chen Dean of the School of Arts and Letters at Peking University, bringing the New Youth editorial board to Beijing, where Hu Shi, Li Dazhao, Lu Xun, Qian Xuantong, and others joined. The magazine championed 'Mr. Science' and 'Mr. Democracy' as the twin pillars of China's renewal, launching a comprehensive assault on Confucian orthodoxy and traditional mores. Chen's February 1917 manifesto 'On the Literary Revolution' called for overthrowing the 'aristocratic literature' of the elite and creating a 'national literature of the people,' igniting the vernacular language revolution that displaced classical Chinese as the official written medium after millennia of dominance. Lu Xun's 'Diary of a Madman' (1918) inaugurated a wave of baihua creative writing, and circulation surged from 1,000 to 16,000 copies. In December 1918, Chen and Li Dazhao founded the more overtly political Weekly Critic, seeding the intellectual ground for the May Fourth Movement of 1919. Conservative backlash forced Chen's resignation from Peking University in March 1919; arrested in June, he spent 83 days in jail. But the generation of youth shaped by New Youth had already begun to transform China's political landscape. Mao Zedong would later call Chen the 'commander-in-chief' of the May Fourth Movement.

After his release from prison in 1937, Chen Duxiu settled in Jiangjin, Sichuan, and embarked on a final period of writing that re-examined his entire revolutionary experience. In fourteen letters and essays written between 1937 and 1942, he condemned Stalin's Soviet Union as a system that had erected a bureaucratic dictatorship in the name of 'socialism in one country,' while also distancing himself from the Trotskyist camp. Chen argued that the very concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat carried an inherent risk of subverting democracy, and that genuine socialism had to be built upon the institutional achievements of bourgeois democracy: universal suffrage, freedom of speech, and the legal existence of opposition parties. Declaring that 'democracy is a universal principle of human progress,' he broke fundamentally with the Leninist vanguard-party model. These late writings were collected and published by Chinese Trotskyists in 1948 as Chen Duxiu's Last Articles and Letters, and they remain a distinctive contribution to debates on the relationship between socialism and democracy.