People of the Revolution and the USSR

Communist Party of China Chinese communism 1893–1981 ○ Natural causes

Sun Yat-sen’s widow who stayed with the Kuomintang left and became a vice-chair of the People’s Republic

At the 1922 mutiny she stayed behind to cover Sun Yat-sen's escape, saying 'China can do without me; it cannot do without you.' On 16 May 1981, weeks before her death, she was admitted to the CCP and named honorary chairman of the PRC.

The second of the three Soong sisters of a wealthy Christian Shanghai family, she married Sun Yat-sen in 1915. Opposing Chiang Kai-shek’s anti-Communist coup in 1927 she became the symbol of the Kuomintang left, went to Moscow, and in the 1930s led the China League for Civil Rights in Shanghai. During the war with Japan she organised the China Defence League in Hong Kong to supply the Communist base areas. In 1949 she became a vice-chair of the Central People’s Government; shortly before her death in 1981 she joined the Communist Party and was named honorary president. Her younger sister Soong Mei-ling was Chiang Kai-shek’s wife.

Communist Party of China Chinese communism 1905–1938 ✕ Executed

Internationalist socialist who fought across the Korean independence movement and the Chinese Revolution, subject of Song of Arirang

"Even in death, I want to see Korea's independence and the victory of the socialism I have believed in all my life." — to Nym Wales in Yan'an, 1937

Kim San was an internationalist socialist who fought across the Korean independence movement and the Chinese Revolution. He left twenty-two interviews with American journalist Nym Wales in Yan'an that became Song of Arirang (1941), a first-person account of that struggle; in 1938 he was executed on false spy charges and rehabilitated by the CCP in 1983.

Communist Party of China Chinese communism 1906–1947 ✕ Executed

The writer whose “Wild Lilies” criticised privilege at Yan’an and made him the rectification movement’s first victim

A Party member who in 1942 attacked Yan’an’s privileges in “Wild Lilies”, he was expelled, imprisoned and secretly executed in 1947; Dai Qing called his case the movement’s key measure of repression.

A translator and writer from Henan, he went to Yan’an in 1937 and translated Marxist classics. In March 1942 his essay “Wild Lilies” in Liberation Daily pointed to graded rations and clothing for cadres and to the disillusionment of the young; in the rectification movement he was branded a “Trotskyist” and became the target of mass criticism meetings. Arrested in 1943, he was executed at Xing County, Shanxi, in 1947 during the retreat from Yan’an before the Nationalist offensive. In 1991 the Ministry of Public Security formally withdrew the Trotskyist charge.