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.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1920–1922Moscow correspondent, Chenbao (Morning News)
- 1922Joined the CCP in Moscow
- 1923CCP Central Committee member; party propaganda and journal editor
- 1927–1928Head of CCP Provisional Politburo (de facto party leader)
- 1928–1930Comintern ECCI Presidium member; head of CCP delegation, Moscow
- 1930–1931CCP Central Committee; dismissed after 'putschist' criticism
- 1931–1934Led League of Left-Wing Writers, Shanghai; translation and literary criticism with Lu Xun
- 1934–1935Commissar of Education, Chinese Soviet Republic; editor of Red China
Related historical events
- 1915–1921May Fourth and the founding of the Chinese Communist PartyEarly theorist back from MoscowReported from Moscow in 1920–1922 and returned to become a party theorist.
- 1927–1936From Jinggangshan to Yan’an: the soviet bases and the Long MarchFormer leader left behind and executedToo ill to march, captured by Nationalist troops in 1935 and executed.
Script Reform and the Latinxua Sin Wenz Movement
One axis of Qu's cultural work that is often overlooked is script reform. During his years in the Soviet Union he devised a prototype of the Latinxua Sin Wenz romanization together with the Russian linguist V. S. Kolokolov in 1929. In 1931 Soviet sinologists including Alekseyev, Dragunov and Shprintsin joined Moscow-based Chinese scholars such as Wu Yuzhang, Lin Boqu, Xiao San, Wang Xiangbao and Xu Teli to establish the system. Chinese intellectuals including Lu Xun and Guo Moruo supported it.
The driving concern was literacy. The aim was to replace the characters, which were hard for ordinary people to master, with a Latin alphabet so that workers and peasants could read and write; for that reason the system did not mark tones at all. Work begun in Moscow from 1928 was applied to Chinese labourers living in the Soviet Far East, where it was trialled among some 100,000 people for about four years, and later, in 1940-1942, in the communist-controlled Shaan-Gan-Ning Border Region.
Qu's own activity continued after his political fall in Shanghai in 1931. He kept advocating the abolition of Chinese characters and latinization, continued joint work with Soviet scholars, and shared the question with intellectuals of the left-wing cultural movement. The system became a pioneering asset for later Hanyu Pinyin, but it met opposition because it adapted poorly to regional languages and required learning Mandarin, and it gradually fell out of use. Script reform was an academic and popular cause he kept pressing even after he had been pushed out of politics, and it forms, alongside his translations of Marxist literary theory, the work of his later years.