Ch'ü Ch'iu-pai (29 January 1899-18June 1935), Communist writer, became vice chairman of the propaganda department of the Chinese Communist party and wrote many pamphlets and articles. He unseated Ch'en Tu-hsiu to become general secretary of the party in 1927, but was criticized and removed from office in 1928. He became prominent in the League of Left-Wing Writers, translated and wrote about Russian works, and worked on the romanization of Chinese. He was captured and executed in 1935. Born in Wuchin (Ch'angchou), Kiangsu, Ch'ü Ch'iu-pai came from a gentry family which met with bankruptcy at the turn of the century. Some of his ancestors had served in the Ch'ing government, but none had been high-ranking officials. His father taught him to paint. However, when Ch'ü was still a small boy, his father dissipated the family property, became addicted to opium, left his family, and went to Shantung, where he supported himself by teaching. Chü's mother, an educated woman, was forced to assume responsibility for her six children. Financial strains eventually compelled them to live in the clan temple.

Although impoverished, Ch'ti's mother did her best to give her eldest son an education. As a child, Ch'ü learned poetry from his mother and seal engraving from an uncle. At the Ch'angchou Middle School, he met Chang T'ai-lei (q.v.), who exerted an important influence on him. When Ch'ü Ch'iu-pai was 16 sui, a year before he was to be graduated from middle school, he had to go to work to help support the family. He took a post as a village schoolteacher in the neighboring district of Wusih. In February 1915 his mother, driven to despair by poverty and by family quarrels, committed suicide. In his later writings, Ch'ü often stated that the dissolution of his own family testified to the iniquities of the traditional Chinese social system.

In mid-1915 Ch'ü left home for Wuchang, where he studied English at a foreign-language college for a few months. He also continued his studies of classical Chinese poetry and Buddhism. In 1916 he accompanied one of his cousins to Peking with the intention of becoming a university student. Although denied admission to National Peking University because he was unable to pay the tuition, he was allowed to audit some lectures. In September 1917 he entered the tuition-free Russian-Language School, an affiliate of the ministry of foreign affairs which trained men who would be assigned to the Chinese consulates in Russia or to the Chinese Eastern Railway. One of his schoolmates was Keng Chi-chih, who became a translator of Russian literature. While studying Russian and French in preparation for a career, Ch'ü Ch'iu-pai allotted part of his time to the study of Buddhism. It was then his belief that the world would be saved through the practice of Bodhissattvahood and that everything, including the social system, was transient. Ch'ü later recalled that in the three years between his arrival in Peking in 1916 and the May Fourth Movement of 1919 he led a solitary but busy existence.

Ch'ü participated in the May Fourth Movement as an organizer of student demonstrations at the Russian-Language School. He was jailed for three days as a result of his activities. The patriotic movement, which dramatized political, social, and economic grievances, led some Chinese intellectuals to explore radical ideologies. Ch'ü joined the small Marxist study group organized by Li Ta-chao (q.v.) and took an active part in the cultural movement. With Cheng Chen-to (q.v.) and others, he edited two shortlived periodicals, the Hsin she-hui [new society] and the Jen-tao. Although these two journals were literary magazines sponsored by the YMCA in Peking, they also contained essays on political issues. Ch'ü's articles displayed keen understanding of the problems of Chinese society and at times employed Marxist terminology. The year 1920 marked an important turning point in Ch'ü Ch'iu-pai's career. After completing three years at the Russian-Language School, he received an appointment to go to Moscow as a correspondent for the Peking Ch'en Pao [morning post]. Ch'ü believed that direct observation would enable him to compare the theory of socialism with its practice and that his reports might help to end the intellectual confusion in China that had followed the May Fourth Movement. In 1920 it was difficult to secure valid documents for travel to Russia. Ch'ü Ch'iu-pai obtained the necessary papers from Yurin, then the representative at Peking of the Soviet Far Eastern Republic; and, despite the attempts of friends and relatives to dissuade him, he left Peking on 16 October 1920 for Harbin and Moscow on the first through train to run from China to Russia after the Russian Revolution.

Ch'ü Ch'iu-pai's first significant literary efforts were reports on his initial trip outside China, which he called the "land of black sweetness," to Russia, which he soon labeled the "land of hunger." As one of the first Chinese reporters to visit Russia, Ch'ü Ch'iu-pai sent numerous reports to the Peking Ch'en Pao, some of which later were published as books. One book, entitled O-hsiang chi-cKeng [journey to the land of hunger], was a collection of reports written between November 1920 and October 1921 in Harbin and Moscow. A second, CKih-tu hsin-shih [impressions of the Red capital], described the first nine months of his life in Moscow ; it was published in book form by the Commercial Press at Shanghai in 1924. These books were not merely travelogues. They provided a record of Ch'ü Ch'iu-pai's impressions and were written in a style similar to that of Chinese lyric poetry and Buddhist scriptures. During 1921-22 he also wrote 0-kuo wen-hsueh shih [history of Russian literature], which was published in 1927 as the last section of O-kuo wen-hsueh [Russian literature] , by Chiang Kuangch'ih. The manuscript of his work entitled O-lo-ssu Ko-ming-lun [on the Russian Revolution] was destroyed in 1932.

Ch'ü Ch'iu-pai also attended the First Congress of the Toilers of the East, which, after repeated postponements, was convened in January 1922 at Moscow. Before this time, Ch'ü had been hospitalized with tuberculosis. In February, through the introduction of his friend Chang T'ai-lei, Ch'ü joined the Chinese Communist party while on a short leave from a hospital in Moscow, where he had been recuperating. In the autumn of 1922 Ch'ü became a teaching assistant and interpreter in the newly created Chinese section of the University for Toilers of the East, which had been established a year earlier under the jurisdiction of the People's Commissariat of Nationalities to train cadres from the "eastern nationalities" of the Soviet Union and foreign students from the "colonial countries," especially from Asia. Ch'ü's work at that institution brought him into closer contact with other young Communists and gave him a more thorough knowledge of Marxism-Leninism. Ch'ü Ch'iu-pai was impressed with the discipline and dedication of the Russians to the social idealism of the new system in spite of the drab life they endured. In November-December 1922 Ch'ü Ch'iu-pai served as interpreter for Ch'en Tu-hsiu (q.v.), the general secretary of the Chinese Communist party, who was in Moscow to attend the Fourth Congress of the Comintern. Ch'en was impressed by Ch'u's fluency in Russian and by his familiarity with contemporary Soviet affairs. On Ch'en's recommendation, Ch'ü returned to China early in 1923. In June, he attended the Third National Congress of the Chinese Communist party at Canton, and he was elected to the Central Committee. Official Comintern policy at that time called for the Communists to cooperate with the Kuomintang in achieving a national anti-imperialist revolution in China. Accordingly, Ch'ü joined the Kuomintang. When the First National Congress of the reorganized Kuomintang met at Canton in January 1924, Ch'ü was one of the Communist members of the Kuomintang to be elected to alternate membership on the Central Executive Committee of the Kuomintang. One of his responsibilities was to supervise preparation of the Hsinch'ing-nienchi-kan [new youth quarterly] ; four issues of that journal, edited by Ch'ü, appeared between June 1923 and December 1924.

At the Fourth National Congress of the Chinese Communist party, held at Shanghai in January 1925, Ch'ü was reelected to membership on the Central Committee. As vice chairman of the propaganda department of the Chinese Communist party, he engaged in an active program of writing and lecturing. He also headed the department of sociology at Shanghai University. Although the veteran Kuomintang leader Yü Yu-jen was the nominal head of that institution, it actually was controlled by the Communists, and its principal function was to train Communist cadres. Ch'ü was also a prolific pamphleteer and wrote Chung-kuo kuomin ke-ming yü Tat Chi-t'ao chu-i [the Chinese national revolution and Tai Chi-t'aoism], which was published in September 1925. In connection with the Communist-organized anti-imperialist agitation which followed the May Thirtieth Incident of 1925, when British police fired on Chinese at Shanghai, he edited the Je-hsueh jih-pao [hot blood daily] and wrote the "Wu-san yun-tung chung chih kuo-min keming yü chieh-chi tou-cheng" [national revolution and class struggle during the May Thirtieth movement], which was published in the official Communist organ Hsiang-tao chou-pao (Guide Weekly) on 7 September 1925. He also served as an editor of the Guide Weekly and lectured at training schools for peasant cadres at Canton and Wuhan in 1926-27.

Other works of Ch'ü Ch'iu-pai which were important in the evolution of Chinese Communist doctrine were his Ti-san kuo-chi hai-shih ti-ling kuo-chi [the third international or the zero international?], published in 1927; Chungkuo te shih chieh-chi [the Chinese gentry class], published in 1927; and his attempt to refute Sun Yat-sen's views, San-min chu-i [the Three People's Principles], published in 1928. In 1927 an opposition group within the Chinese Communist party became critical of Ch'en Tu-hsiu for his continued collaboration with the Kuomintang—a policy which Ch'en was supporting, despite personal misgivings, in compliance with Comintern instructions from Moscow. As a leader of the opposition group, Ch'ü Ch'iu-pai accused Ch'en Tu-hsiu of making vital political decisions without consulting other members of the party's Central Committee. Doctrinal disputes, reportedly stemming from Ch'u's jealousy of the favored position of P'eng Shu-chih (q.v.), Ch'en's personal assistant, intensified attack on Ch'en Tu-hsiu's leadership. P'eng Shu-chih, committed to orthodox doctrine, reportedly refused to allow the official Chinese Communist journal to print Mao Tsetung's "Report of an Investigation into the Peasant Movement in Hunan," a statement which stressed the role of the peasants in the revolutionary struggle in China. Ch'ü Ch'iupai, who had been elected head of the peasant department at the party's Fifth National Congress, thereupon wrote a preface to Mao's report and published it as a pamphlet. Communist unity disintegrated further in the summer of 1927, when both the right and the left wings of the Kuomintang set out to exterminate the Communists in areas under their control. In 1927, when the Comintern was forced to change its China policy under Stalin's leadership, the Russians found it expedient to shift responsibility for earlier blunders to the Chinese Communist policies of Ch'en Tu-hsiu. In this move they were aided by Ch'en's opponents within the Chinese Communist top command, who, led by Ch'ü Ch'iu-pai, accused Ch'en and his supporters of adopting a line identical to that of the Trotsky faction in the Soviet Union. In accordance with new directives from the Comintern demanding "reforms" in the leadership of the Chinese party, a small group of Communist delegates convened a secret emergency conference at Kiukiang on 7 August 1927. There Ch'ü Ch'iu-pai denounced Ch'en Tuhsiu, his erstwhile patron, as a right opportunist. At that meeting, which was dominated by Lominadze, the Comintern representative, Ch'ü Ch'iu-pai was elected to replace Ch'en Tu-hsiu as general secretary of the Chinese Communist party. The August meeting also called for the organization and training of workers and peasants in preparation for armed uprisings against the "counter-revolutionary" Kuomintang regimes at Nanking and Wuhan. In November 1927 the Ch'ü Ch'iu-pai group in the Chinese Communist party decided that an uprising in a major city was startegically necessary and gave instructions to Chang T'ai-lei, then head of the south China bureau, to plan and organize an attack on Canton. The resulting attempt, the Canton Commune of December 1927, was quickly suppressed, and Chang T'ai-lei was killed. Because of these failures and the continued loss of party cadres, Ch'ü Ch'iu-pai was summoned to Moscow in the summer of 1928. At the Sixth National Congress of the Chinese Communist party, which met in Moscow in June and July, he made a general report on the revolutionary movement in China from 1925 to 1927 entitled Chung-kuo ke-ming yü Chung-kuo kung-ctian-tang [the Chinese revolution and the Chinese Communist party]. After the general review of 1927 failures in China, Ch'ü Ch'iu-pai was severely criticized for left opportunism and was removed from the post of general secretary of the party, which he had held for less than a year. He was replaced by Hsiang Chung-fa (q.v.), Despite political criticism, Ch'ü Ch'iupai was named a Chinese delegate to the Comintern and was elected to the Executive Committee of that organization.

From 1928 until mid- 1930 Ch'ü lived a relatively uneventful life in Moscow. He wrote several polemical pamphlets, notably Kung-ch'an kuo-chi yü tang-ctüen wen-t'i [the Communist International and current problems] and Fantui Ch'en Tu-hsiu chi-hui chu-i [oppose Ch'en Tu-hsiu's opportunism]. In 1929 he visited Western Europe to attend Communist-sponsored meetings in Paris and Berlin. Meanwhile, he continued research on the problem of romanization of the Chinese language, which he had begun to study in 1911 during his first stay in Moscow. In the spring of 1929, in cooperation with Kolokolov, a teacher of Chinese language at the University for Toilers of the East, he devised a system of romanization for Chinese and conducted experiments among Chinese students in Moscow. The following year, he published in Moscow a pamphlet entitled Zhonguo Latinhuadi Zemu [Chinese romanized alphabet]. Characteristic of his work was the entire omission of tone representation except for a very few cases, a sharp break with prevailing concepts. In 1930-31 numerous meetings were held in Russia and the Soviet Far East to discuss his system. Such prominent Russian sinologues and linguists as B. M. Alexeiev took part in these discussions. The First Conference on the Romanization of Chinese was held in Vladivostok in September 1931. In 1932 a romanized script, which was a revised version of Ch'ü's original work, was introduced into all Chinese schools in the Far East region of the Soviet Union.

In mid- 1930, apparently because of disagreements with Pavel Mif, the chief of the Chinese section of the Eastern department of the Comintern and the president of Sun Yat-sen University, Ch'ü Ch'iu-pai was removed from the Chinese delegation to the Comintern. In the early autumn of 1930 he returned to China. He became involved with plans for changing the policies associated with Li Li-san, whose program of seizing large cities to spark a national revolution in China had proved fruitless. At the third plenum of the sixth Central Committee of the Chinese Communist party, held from 24 to 28 September 1930, Ch'ü stressed that the Comintern directive of 23 July 1930 was the basic policy directive for the Chinese Communist party. According to that directive, although the rising tide of revolution in China was indisputable, there was not yet an "objective revolutionary situation on a national scale." Although Li Li-san was removed from the Political Bureau in November 1930, Hsiang Chung-fa remained as the general secretary of the party. Ch'ü Ch'iu-pai was accused of political ambivalence, and in January 1 93 1 what remained of his authority was undermined when control of the central apparatus of the Chinese Communist party at Shanghai was taken over by the so-called 28 Bolsheviks, including Ch'en Shao-yü, Chang Wen-t'ien, and Shen Tse-min (qq.v.). From 1931 through 1933 Ch'ü Ch'iu-pai remained in Shanghai, where he became a prominent figure in the League of Left-Wing Writers and helped to shape its policies. He urged the creation of a new Chinese literature, written in simple language and dedicated to serving society; he wrote articles supporting this view, using several pen names. Ch'ü produced many critical writings and translations of Western and Russian works, and he did much to introduce his readers to important Russian authors, including Gorky and Serafimovich. During this period in Shanghai, Ch'ü was close to Lu Hsün (Chou Shu-jen, q.v.) and to Mao Tun (Shen Yen-ping, q.v.), the only two modern Chinese authors for whom he had high regard. Ch'ü wrote the preface for the Lu Hsun tsa-kan hsuan-chi [collected miscellaneous essays of Lu Hsün]. Lu Hsün had high regard for Ch'ü's unusual literary and linguistic talents and frequently consulted him on problems of translation. Although Lu Hsün was not a Communist, his hostility to the Kuomintang was well known, and he lived with the constant possibility of arrest. Nonetheless, he provided Ch'ü with refuge from Nationalist police agents on three occasions.

In January 1934 Ch'ü went to the main Communist base at Juichin, Kiangsi, as Shanghai area representative to the second All-China Congress of Soviets. Shortly thereafter, he was named people's commissar of education and director of the art bureau of the central soviet government headed by Mao Tse-tung. When Nationalist military pressure forced the Communists to evacuate the base in the autumn of 1934, Ch'ü remained in Kiangsi to take charge of propaganda. He became ill that winter, however, and had to be carried on a stretcher. He was ordered to go to Shanghai to work for the party, and he left Kiangsi. The group with which he was traveling was discovered in Fukien by National Government troops under the command of Sung Hsi-lien, and Ch'ü was captured on 23 February 1935. Ch'ü's identity soon was discovered, and he was imprisoned at Ch'angting, Fukien. During his imprisonment, he wrote his final testament, entitled To-yu te hua [superfluous words], and composed poems in the classical Chinese style. Ch'ü remained a confirmed Communist to the end and sang the "Internationale" in Russian on the way to his public execution on 18 June 1935. His final request was that he be shot while lying on the ground.

In official statements of the post-1949 period, Ch'ü Ch'iu-pai was extolled as an honorable Communist martyr and was grouped with such worthies as Jen Pi-shih, Lin Po-ch'u, Lo Junghuan, and other "late leaders of the Chinese Communist party." In 1955, on the twentieth anniversary of his death, Ch'ü's remains were moved to be buried in the Cemetary of Revolutionary Heroes in the western outskirts of Peking. A collection of Ch'ü's literary works, the Ch'ü Ch'iu-pai wen-chi, was published at Peking in four volumes in 1953-54. Omitted from that extensive collection was To-yu te hua, which was smuggled out of Fukien and published in the I-ching magazine in Shanghai in 1937. In it, Ch'ü presented himself as an average man of letters, unsuited by personality to fill the role of revolutionary leader. As he neared death in 1935, Ch'ü saw his life as a comedy of errors into which he had been thrust by fate or, in his words, by "historical misunderstanding." In 1931-32 Lu Hsün had begun to assemble Ch'ü's writings and translations. These were published in 1936 under the title Hai-shang shu-lin [collected works]. As an essayist and translator, Ch'ü Ch'iu-pai must be ranked as one of the foremost literary figures directly associated with the Chinese Communist party in the years before 1935.

After returning from his first sojourn in Russia in 1923, Ch'ü Ch'iu-pai married Wang Chien-hung at Shanghai. She died shortly thereafter. In 1924 Ch'ü married Yang Chihhua, a student at Shanghai University. She had previously been the wife of Sheng Chiennung, the son of Shen Ting-i (T. Hsuan-lu), one of the founding members of the Chinese Communist party in 1921, but her marriage had ended in divorce. Yang Chih-hua, also known as Yang Hsiao-hua, was with Ch'ü Ch'iu-pai in Moscow from 1928 to 1930 and in Shanghai during the early 1930's. After Ch'ü's execution she again went to Moscow. She was one of the Communist cadres assigned in 1937 to work in Sinkiang province, where she was arrested by Sheng Shih-ts'ai and imprisoned until 1946. After the establishment of the Central People's Government in 1949, Yang Chih-hua held a prominent position in the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, and she became a vice chairman of the Women's Federation in 1957.