Chat with Li Da-zhao

Revolutionary and Political Leader

About Li Da-zhao

In the spring of 1918, while cataloging rare texts in Peking University’s library basement, he copied out Marx’s ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ in classical Chinese calligraphy, not as translation, but as incantation. That quiet act seeded China’s first Marxist study group, which met weekly in a smoke-filled attic above a soy-sauce shop near Dong’an Market. He didn’t wield a rifle at Wuchang or command troops in Jiangxi; his weapon was syntax, reframing Confucian terms like ‘ren’ (benevolence) and ‘dao’ (the way) to carry dialectical materialism, insisting revolution required not just class struggle but epistemic rupture. When students asked how to respond to Japan’s Twenty-One Demands, he handed them inkstones and said, ‘Write your anger until the ink turns red.’ His 1927 execution by warlord Zhang Zuolin wasn’t the end of a career, it was the crystallization of a method: theory forged in archival labor, pedagogy as resistance, and political clarity measured not in decrees issued but in how many students kept writing after the lights went out.

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Conversation Starters

Not sure where to begin? Try asking Li Da-zhao:

  • “How did you adapt Marxist theory for readers steeped in Confucian classics?”
  • “What role did the Peking University Library play in early communist organizing?”
  • “Why did you oppose the Comintern’s directive to merge with the KMT in 1923?”
  • “Can you describe the debates inside the Beijing Marxist Study Society in 1920?”

Frequently Asked Questions

Did Li Dazhao personally draft the Chinese Communist Party’s founding program in 1921?
No, he did not attend the First National Congress in Shanghai, nor did he draft its formal program. His contribution was foundational but indirect: the CCP’s ideological framework emerged from his 1919 essay ‘My Marxist Views’ and the study society’s internal resolutions, which emphasized peasant mobilization and anti-imperialist unity over strict proletarian vanguardism. He co-authored the party’s earliest organizational guidelines with Chen Duxiu in 1920, but those were internal directives, not public documents.
What was Li Dazhao’s relationship with Mao Zedong during their time at Peking University?
Mao worked under Li as a library assistant from 1918 to 1919, sorting periodicals and transcribing bibliographic cards. Li mentored him in Marxist theory through private tutorials and introduced him to Russian revolutionary texts. Though Mao later diverged ideologically, especially on rural revolution versus urban proletariat, his 1936 interview with Edgar Snow explicitly credits Li as ‘the first person who made me understand what socialism really meant.’
How did Li Dazhao interpret ‘dialectical materialism’ differently from Soviet orthodoxy?
He rejected mechanical determinism, arguing historical materialism must account for China’s agrarian social structure and Confucian moral frameworks. In his 1924 lecture series ‘On Historical Materialism,’ he redefined ‘means of production’ to include irrigation systems and clan landholdings, not just factories, and insisted ideology wasn’t mere superstructure but an active agent shaping productive relations in semi-feudal contexts.
Why was Li Dazhao executed in 1927, and what happened to his manuscripts afterward?
Zhang Zuolin’s forces arrested him in April 1927 for leading underground KMT-CCP united front activities and organizing railway worker strikes. His personal library, including annotated copies of Hegel’s ‘Logic’ in German and handwritten glosses on the ‘Communist Manifesto’, was seized and mostly destroyed, though fragments survived hidden in temple roof beams by his student Fan Wenlan and resurfaced in 1954 during archival restoration work in Beijing.
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Topics

revolutionpoliticscultural revolution

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