Views on Chen DuXiu

[Brandon's Impotent Rage]

So I'm curious what everyone here thinks of Chen DuXiu, the co-founder of the Communist Party of China and considered by many to be the face of the May Fourth Movement.

Chen seems to be something of a taboo in China. If I'm correct, this supposedly has to do with the 'defeatist line' involving the disastrous alliance between the Party and the KMT. The problem with this though, is that Chen had been ordered by the Comintern to ally with the KMT over his own objections....and then they had the nerve to blame HIM for the whole debacle!

[John Nada]

He was an opportunist telling the Comintern what they wanted to hear, and a yes-man going along with their "orders". Chen didn't have to go along with the Comintern. As a leader of a revolution in an important country, he had a lot of leeway. It doesn't matter if he hurt the Soviets feelings, his job was to look out for his men and women. You can only look at how the Soviets bent over backwards for Chiang Kai-shek, the supposedly "progressive" bourgeois leader who betrayed and pissed off just about everyone, even in the KMT. He was no Sun, if Chen told the Comintern to go fuck themselves and not liquidate the Party into the KMT, what could the Soviets do? Pull support from their greatest hope? No, if I were a Chinese Communist I'd think he was intentionally trying to get me killed.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

He was an opportunist telling the Comintern what they wanted to hear, and a yes-man going along with their "orders". Chen didn't have to go along with the Comintern. As a leader of a revolution in an important country, he had a lot of leeway. It doesn't matter if he hurt the Soviets feelings, his job was to look out for his men and women. You can only look at how the Soviets bent over backwards for Chiang Kai-shek, the supposedly "progressive" bourgeois leader who betrayed and pissed off just about everyone, even in the KMT. He was no Sun, if Chen told the Comintern to go fuck themselves and not liquidate the Party into the KMT, what could the Soviets do? Pull support from their greatest hope? No, if I were a Chinese Communist I'd think he was intentionally trying to get me killed.

Chiang was no Sun, but Sun was not that different from Chiang, in the end. That he did not kill communists can mostly be attributed to their weakness in the south of China, and of course Sun's early death from cancer. And as for whether the Soviets would pull support from the CPC, they did, several times. In fact the aftermath of the Shanghai massacre was one of them, as was the end of WWII, when the Soviet Union turned over much of Manchuria to GMD administration. If Chiang had been smarter and waited a while before turning entirely to the US, he could have had Manchuria to himself.