P'eng Shu-chih (1896-), close associate of Ch'en Tu-hsiu who left the Chinese Communist party with Ch'en and became a leader of the Trotskyist movement in China.

Born in Hunan, P'eng Shu-chih came from a peasant family which was relatively well-to-do by Chinese rural standards. After receiving his early education in Hunan, he went to Shanghai in 1920. There he joined the Socialist Youth League organized in August of that year by the Comintern representative in China, Gregory Voitinsky. Another Hunanese youth, Liu Shaoch'i (q.v.), joined the league about the same time.

P'eng Shu-chih and Liu Shao-ch'i both studied Russian at a small language school established at Shanghai by Gregory Voitinsky and his Chinese assistant Yang Ming-chai. In January 1921, on a visit to Changsha, P'eng helped Mao Tse-tung form a local branch of the Socialist Youth League. P'eng then returned to Shanghai to join a group of about 20 young Chinese (including Liu Shao-ch'i, Jen Pi-shih, Hsiao Ching-kuang, and Lo I-nung) preparing to go to Russia. This was the first group recruited in China by the Comintern to study Marxism and to observe Socialist practice in the Soviet Union. Under difficult conditions, the group spent three months traveling from China to Moscow by way of Vladivostok. After reaching Moscow in the spring of 1921, P'eng Shu-chih and his Chinese associates enrolled at the Communist University for Toilers of the East. That institution had been established by the People's Commissariat of Nationalities to train cadres from "eastern nationalities" of the Soviet Union and from "colonial countries," especially those of Asia and the Middle East. The school was poorly organized, and the Chinese students there were handicapped further by their language inadequacy. These drawbacks and the drab living conditions in Moscow notwithstanding, the Chinese students were impressed by the revolutionary spirit found in the Soviet Union. P'eng was elected secretary of the Moscow branch of the Chinese Communist party. He also joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. On his return to China in 1923, P'eng Shuchih was assigned by the Chinese Communist party to work in the propaganda department, then headed by Ts'ai Ho-sen (q.v.), of its Central Committee. P'eng contributed numerous articles to the Chinese Communist journals of the period, notably Hsiang-tao chou-pao {Guide Weekly) and Hsin cKing-nien chi-k'an [new youth quarterly]. Through his writings he established a reputation as one of the more articulate Chinese Communist theorists of the period. He became associated with Ch'en Tu-hsiu (q.v.) and was regarded as a faithful young lieutenant of Ch'en, who then was the party's general secretary.

The years 1924 and 1925 marked P'eng Shuchih's rise to a position of authority in the Chinese Communist movement. In 1924 he visited Moscow for the second time as an official Chinese delegate to the Fifth World Congress of the Comintern. In 1925, at the Fourth National Congress of the Chinese Communist party, he was elected to the Central Committee. Meanwhile, he had also become a member of the party's Political Bureau. When Ts'ai Ho-sen left China to attend the sixth plenum of the Executive Committee of the Comintern late in 1925, P'eng succeeded him as head of the propaganda department and as chief editor of the Hsiang-tao chou-pao. The year 1925 was also a significant year in P'eng's personal life, for he met Ch'en Pi-lan, who was to become his wife. She came from a scholarly family and had attended school in Hupeh during the period of the May Fourth Movement. In 1922 she had joined the Chinese Communist party, and in 1923 she had gone to Peking to work for the party under Li Ta-chao (q.v.). She had enrolled at Shanghai University in 1923 and had gone to Moscow to study in 1924. After returning to China in the spring of 1925, she worked under Hsiang Ching-yu (q.v.) among women students and factory workers in Shanghai. She was also an editor of Chung-kuo fu-nü tsa-chih [Chinese women], a journal with which Hsiang Ching-yu was then associated. Beginning in 1926, P'eng Shu-chih and Ch'en Tu-hsiu began to follow policies that ran counter to Comintern policy for China. After the coup of 20 March 1926 when Chiang Kaishek dissolved a Hong Kong strike committee and removed many Communists from prominent posts, Ch'en Tu-hsiu sent P'eng to Canton to consult Borodin, then a Comintern representative. P'eng, following Ch'en's instructions, suggested that all Chinese Communist members should withdraw from the Kuomintang. He also asked Borodin to give Soviet arms to the Chinese peasants. Borodin refused both suggestions and reaffirmed the Comintern policy of Communist party collaboration with the Kuomintang in China.

In the spring of 1927 P'eng, Ch'en, and Lo I-nung (q.v.) were reportedly "shocked" by the Comintern order that the Shanghai workers bury their weapons and avoid clashing with Chiang Kai-shek's forces. By that time the Comintern had decided to remove Ch'en Tu-hsiu from party leadership by inciting defection of a group within the Central Committee led by Ch'ü Ch'iu-pai and Chang Kuo-t'ao (q.v.). Ch'en and P'eng seemed to be aware that such action was impending. According to Pavel Mif, a Comintern representative, they "plotted" to postpone the Fifth National Congress of the Chinese Communist party in order to forestall a possible crisis. In April 1927, the congress convened in Hankow. The meeting was marked by the ascendency of the Ch'ü Ch'iu-pai faction backed by Comintern representatives, and Ch'en Tu-hsiu was forced to make a confession of past errors. In July 1927, at an enlarged meeting of the Central Committee, Ch'en and P'eng Shu-chih proposed that Chinese Communist members withdraw from the Kuomintang. This motion reportedly was passed by the majority but vetoed by the Comintern. On 13 July, Ch'en Tu-hsiu, in the name of the Chinese Communist party, issued a declaration at Hankow denouncing Kuomintang members there. The Kuomintang faction at Wuhan led by Wang Ching-wei (q.v.) decided on 21 July to purge the Communists in areas under its control. After the final rupture in the Kuomintang-Communist alliance, Stalin's group in the Comintern was forced to shift its policy, and it ordered the Chinese Communists to encourage peasant uprisings. Ch'en and P'eng both resolutely opposed this drastic change of policy, but their views went unheeded. In the intraparty struggle of the mid-1920's, P'eng Shu-chih's principal antagonist was Ch'ü Ch'iu-pai, who was jealous of his favored position as well as opposed to many of his ideas. P'eng's view of the Chinese revolution stemmed from his belief in the prime revolutionary role of the proletariat. As early as 1924 he had expounded the view that the Chinese bourgeoisie had become anti-revolutionary and that the peasantry could not lead the revolution because it was backward by nature. The proletariat, therefore, was the natural leader of the revolution. The Kuomintang, according to P'eng, was a coalition of "bureaucratic and compradore" elements and "new warlords." The proletariat should not submit to its leadership, for the Kuomintang was essentially a reactionary political and military apparatus. On the basis of these arguments, P'eng worked to end the alliance between the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist party. Along with Ch'en Tu-hsiu he opposed Communist participation in the Northern Expedition, saying that the Chinese Communist party should devote itself to educating and organizing the masses in preparation for the proletarian revolution. P'eng set forth these views in a pamphlet entitled Chung-kuo ko-ming chih chi-pen wen-t'i [basic problems of the Chinese revolution] .

P'eng's views were denounced by Ch'ü Ch'iu-pai, who acted as a spokesman for the Stalinist group in the Comintern in condemning Ch'en Tu-hsiu's leadership of the Chinese Communist party. In a polemical pamphlet written in March 1927, Ch'ü Ch'iu-pai accused P'eng Shu-chih of understating the strength of the national bourgeoisie and the peasantry. He said that P'eng's analysis of the class composition of the Kuomintang was false because militarists could not be regarded as a social class in the Marxist sense. Ch'ü branded P'eng's views as "sheer Trotskyism." The 1926-27 controversy over revolutionary strategy also affected Mao Tse-tung. As editor of the Hsiang-tao chou-pao, P'eng Shu-chih published only a portion of Mao's "Report of an Investigation into the Peasant Movement in Hunan," which stressed the key role of the peasantry in the revolutionary struggle in China. When P'eng refused to print the rest of the article, Ch'ü Ch'iu-pai recommended its publication as a separate pamphlet and wrote an introduction to it.

On 7 August 1927 some 20 Communist delegates met in a secret emergency conference at which Ch'ü Ch'iu-pai replaced Ch'en Tu-hsiu as general secretary of the Chinese Communist party. P'eng Shu-chih was removed from his party posts and was assigned to work in north China to incite uprisings in the Peking-Tientsin area. Because he postponed his trip north, he was dismissed from the Political Bureau. He then went to Shanghai to join Ch'en Tu-hsiu. In the summer of 1928 Stalin summoned Ch'en Tu-hsiu and P'eng Shu-chih to the Sixth World Congress of the Comintern in Moscow, but both men declined the invitation. In early 1929 they came into contact with a number of Chinese students, who had returned from Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow with Trotsky's new essays, "Summary and Perspective of the Chinese Revolution" and "The Chinese Question After the Sixth World Congress." Stimulated by Trotsky's views, they wrote to the Central Committee demanding that the Chinese Communist party's "adventurous" policy be changed. Furthermore, they persuaded some 80 party members to sign a manifesto that charged Stalin with having replaced Lenin's democratic centralism with bureaucratic dictatorship. After the publication of the manifesto in December 1929, P'eng Shu-chih, Ch'en Tu-hsiu, and other signers, including P'eng's wife, were expelled from the Chinese Communist party. A month prior to his expulsion, P'eng had been dismissed from the Kiangsu provincial committee.

Embittered, P'eng, Ch'en Tu-hsiu, and their followers, now branded as the ch'u-hsiao p'ai [liquidation faction] by the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist party, organized a pro-Trotsky opposition group, the Wu-ch'an-che she [proletarian society] and began to publish a journal, Wu-ch'an-che [the proletariat]. Aside from Ch'en Tu-hsiu's group, three other Trotskyist societies also existed in Shanghai: the Wo-men ti hua [our words] group, the Chan-tou she [combat society], and the Shihyueh she [October society]. In May 1931, on advice received from Trotsky in Turkey and with funds from Trotskyist organizations in Europe, these rival groups merged to form the Chinese Communist Party Left Opposition Faction (Chung-kuo kung-ch'an-tang tso-p'ai fan-tui-p'ai).

The new organization was dominated by Ch'en Tu-hsiu's Wu-ch'an-che she. As Ch'en's trusted aide, P'eng Shu-chih became a member of the standing committee. P'eng contributed many articles to Huo-hua [the spark], one of the organization's publications. Before long, however, the Opposition party was torn by internal dissension and by police interventions. On 15 October 1932 Ch'en Tu-hsiu was arrested. P'eng and others were imprisoned about the same time. After being given a trial, which lasted two years and was much publicized in China, Ch'en and P'eng were sentenced to fifteen years in prison, but the sentence later was reduced to eight years. After the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war, the National Government declared a general amnesty for political prisoners, and in August 1937 P'eng, Ch'en, and their associates were released on parole. After regaining his freedom, P'eng Shu-chih sought refuge in the International Settlement of Shanghai. When Ch'en Tu-hsiu declared that he was independent of any political group, P'eng began to gather together the forces of the Chinese Trotskyists. He published several clandestine magazines and translations of Trotsky's works, notably his History of the Russian Revolution and The Revolution Betrayed. Despite his best efforts the movement failed to gain momentum. After the Japanese occupied Shanghai, they imprisoned many Chinese Trotskyists. P'eng escaped arrest. From 1941 to 1945, he taught under an assumed name at Shanghai University, where he lectured on Chinese history and on Western literature and philosophy. At war's end, P'eng reestablished connections with Trotskyists and published journals in the name of the Chinese Communist Party Left Opposition Faction. One of these journals, CKiu-chen [searching for truth] reportedly attained a monthly circulation of nearly 5,000 copies. In the inaugural issue of that magazine in 1946, P'eng sought to synthesize the views of Lao-tzu with those of Trotsky. In August 1948, the Opposition party held a third national convention, attended by some 300 members.

In late 1948, when the victory of the Chinese Communists on the mainland appeared imminent, P'eng Shu-chih and his wife fled to Hong Kong, where P'eng published a Chinese language edition of the Fourth International of the Socialist Workers party in the United States. In 1949, fearing arrest by the Hong Kong authorities, P'eng fled to Viet Nam and thence to Europe. He and his wife arrived in France in the summer of 1951 and took up residence in Paris as political refugees, sustained by friends and sympathizers. They continued to produce Trotskyist analyses of Chinese politics while working on their memoirs. Ross Dowson interviewed them and wrote "Chinese Revolutionists in Exile," which appeared in the summer 1963 issue of the International Socialist Review, published in New York. P'eng Shuchih's views on the background of contemporary developments in China were reported in interviews with Antonio Farien which appeared in World Outlook (12 August 1966 and 10 February 1 967 issues) . These interviews were incorporated in a pamphlet, Behind China'''s "Great Cultural Revolution," which was published in New York in May 1967.