Ch'en Shao-yü Ch'en Shao-yü (1907-), leader of the proteges of Pavel Mif known as the 28 Bolsheviks, was general secretary of the Chinese Communist party (1931-32), Chinese representative to the Comintern (1932-37), and a member of the Comintern's Executive Committee. In 1937 he returned to China. His disagreements with Mao Tse-tung caused Mao to launch the cheng-feng [rectification] movement in 1942. Ch'en's policies were condemned and thereafter he was a target of Communist criticism.

A native of Liuan, Anhwei province, Ch'en Shao-yü was the son of a well-to-do farmer. He attended middle school in Wuhan, where he was attracted to the activities of the Socialist Youth League. Accordingly, he went to Shanghai and enrolled at Shanghai University, an institution established to train cadres for political work. Several Communists, including Ch'ü Ch'iu-pai, Teng Chung-hsia, and Yun Tai-ying (qq.v.) were instructors there, and Ch'en became a member of the Chinese Communist party in 1925, when he was not yet 20.

Late in 1 925 Ch'en was selected by the Chinese Communist party to go to Russia for study at Sun Yat-sen University, which had been established specifically to train Chinese cadres. After his arrival in Moscow in November 1925, Ch'en began to study Russian and Marxism-Leninism. In January 1927 he was sent back to China on a special mission, the details of which were unknown at the time even to his fellow Chinese students in Moscow. That trip took him to Wuhan, where he served as interpreter for Pavel Mifat the Fifth National Congress of the Chinese Communist party, held in the spring of 1927. Ch'en remained at Wuhan to perform liaison tasks for Borodin during the summer. After the break between the Kuomintang and the Communists, he returned to Moscow in August 1927. Because he had witnessed the developments in China during the critical months of 1927, Ch'en Shao-yü was able to become a leader of the Chinese students at Sun Yat-sen University. His rise was assisted by the fact that his mentor, Pavel Mif, replaced Karl Radek as head of Sun Yat-sen University at that time. Ch'en soon became secretary of the Moscow branch of the Chinese Communist Youth League. He had another opportunity to observe Communist party politics in Moscow in the summer of 1928, when he served as interpreter at both the Sixth National Congress of the Chinese Communist party and the Sixth Congress of the Comintern A group of Mif's favorite Chinese students in Moscow were regarded as such firm supporters of Stalin's China policy that they became known as the 28 Bolsheviks. In addition to Ch'en Shao-yü, that group included Chang Wen-t'ien, Ch'in Pang-hsien, Shen Tse-min, Wang Chia-hsiang (qq.v.), and others. In the summer of 1930, when Pavel Mif was made Comintern delegate to China, his young Chinese proteges accompanied him from Moscow to Shanghai. Ch'en Shao-yü, the leader of the group, served as Mif's interpreter and was associated with Mif in the ensuing intra-party struggle at Shanghai against the leadership of Li Li-san (q.v.). Previously, Ch'en Shao-yü's writings on revolutionary strategy had been similar to what was later referred to as the Li Li-san line. Ch'en had supported the conventional view that the Communist program in China should emphasize the early use of military action to seize urban centers and to establish contact with the urban proletariat. Nonetheless, Ch'en and his comrades benefitted from the fact that Li Li-san was made the scapegoat for the abortive Chinese Communist military actions in 1930 and was removed from the Political Bureau of the party in November. At the fourth plenum of the Sixth Central Committee, held at Shanghai in January 1931, the group associated with Mif gained control of the central party organs in an action that has been called the last identifiable instance of direct Soviet interference in the internal affairs of the Chinese Communist party.

After the execution of Hsiang Chung-fa (q.v.), who had been titular head of the party from 1928 to 1931, Ch'en Shao-yü became its general secretary at the age of 24. His most significant political action was to staff the Political Bureau at Shanghai with other members of the Russiantrained group, such as Chang Wen-t'ien, Ch'in Pang-hsien and Shen Tse-min. A year later, in the autumn of 1932, Ch'en Shao-yü returned to Moscow as Chinese representative to the Comintern, and Ch'in Pang-hsien succeeded him as general secretary of the Chinese Communist party. Ch'en Shao-yü's move to the Soviet Union in 1932 was more an exile than a promotion, though he soon gained an international reputation as an orthodox interpreter of the Chinese revolution. He was elected to membership on the Executive Committee of the Comintern in 1933, and he began to write authoritative articles in official Communist journals in Moscow. Ch'en's view of political strategy doubtless was colored by the fact that, as viewed from Moscow, the major threat confronting the international Communist movement after 1933 was the rise of Nazi Germany. In response to that development, the Soviet leadership, in an attempt to secure new allies, abandoned its hard, leftist line in world politics. In 1935, the Seventh Congress of the Comintern was called to announce the new policy.

As part of the Comintern strategy, the Communist parties in the so-called colonial areas of the world were assigned the task of renewing their collaboration with bourgeois nationalist movements. The principal spokesman for the new policy as it affected the underdeveloped areas was Ch'en Shao-yü. Soon after the Seventh Comintern Congress opened, Ch'en delivered a major report on 7 August 1935 discussing the situation in China. Using the pseudonym Wang Ming, he wrote a revised and expanded version of that report entitled The Revolutionary Movement in the Colonial Countries, which was published in New York in 1935. The essence of the new line was that the Communists in China should attempt to unite four classes (the proletariat, the peasantry, the petty bourgeoisie, and the national bourgeoisie) in an anti-imperialist struggle against Japan. Ch'en Shao-yü's statement was praised in Moscow as a major theoretical analysis of the so-called anti- Japanese people's front in China, and he was reelected to membership on the Executive Committee of the Comintern. In January 1936 Ch'en Shao-yü tried to force Chiang Ching-kuo (q.v.) to write a letter to his mother condemning Chiang Kai-shek, refusing to return to China, and expressing his dedication to the Communist cause. Chiang Chingkuo finally complied, but he complained to the general director of the NKVD about it. After conferring with Ch'en Shao-yü, the director suggested that the letter be destroyed. However, it had already been published in China. Ch'en returned to China in 1937, traveling by way of Sinkiang with Ch'en Yun and K'ang Sheng (qq.v.). While in Moscow, he had acquired a reputation as a theorist and the favor of Stalin. After his arrival at Yenan, Ch'en, as a member of the Central Committee of the party, set forth a political strategy that differed in Ch'en Shao-yü emphasis from the ten-point program that had been offered by Mao Tse-tung in August 1937. Ch'en advocated a doctrinaire imitation of the basic Stalinist united-front strategy that had been evolved in Moscow. Thus, he favored close collaboration with Chiang Kai-shek. He apparently did not believe that the Chinese Communist party, weak as it was after the Long March, could lead the war of resistance against the well-trained Japanese infantry units in China. He therefore proposed close cooperation with the Kuomintang through integrating the Communist military units into the Nationalist forces to achieve unity in command, organization, planning, and operations. These ideas were presented in his December 1937 statement entitled "The Key to Saving the Present Situation." In 1938, Ch'en Shao-yü, who then directed the united-front department of the Central Committee, was sent to Hankow as a member of the Chinese Communist liaison group and secretary of the Ch'ang-chiang (Yangtze) regional bureau of the party. While at Hankow, he reportedly made statements without having obtained the sanction of the Chinese Communist top command at Yenan, and he may have exceeded his instructions. After his return to Shensi, he was criticized at a meeting of the Political Bureau held at Loch'uan on 25 August 1938 and at the sixth plenum of the Central Committee in October. Ch'en Shaoyü's dispute with Mao Tse-tung over current strategy later developed into a controversy over party history. In the summer of 1941, Ch'en Shao-yü, apparently attempting to invoke the political authority gained through his years in Moscow, republished his 1931 pamphlet, Liangi'iao lu-hsien [the two lines], in which he condemned Mao Tse-tung's view of the revolutionary capacities of the Chinese peasantry as being non-Marxist and called for a struggle for the more complete Bolshevization of the Chinese Communist party.

Ch'en Shao-yü remained a member of the Central Committee and retained his command of the orthodox canon of Marxism-Leninism, but he had lost touch with the real sources of political and military power in the Communist movement in China. His clash with Mao Tsetung at Yenan came to affect the entire party membership when Mao and his adherents launched the so-called cheng-feng [rectification] movement in 1942. Before that campaign had concluded, Mao had confirmed his authority over the party and the essential political correctness of his own political line, while Ch'en Shaoyü's claim to act as an authoritative Chinese Communist spokesman had been demolished. The cheng-feng campaign was not a blood purge on the Stalinist model; it was aimed at men in the party elite whom Mao Tse-tung viewed as Moscow-trained dogmatists. In Mao's view, these men, notably Ch'en Shao-yü, lacked sufficient experience in practical political work in China to balance their theoretical knowledge gained in the Soviet Union.

The official Maoist critique of Ch'en Shao-yü was set forth in a resolution on party history adopted on 20 April 1945 immediately before the opening of the Seventh National Congress of the Chinese Communist party. That document identified three leftist lines that had gained temporary ascendency in the Chinese Communist party in opposition to the policies advocated by Mao Tse-tung and his adherents. The first two were associated with Ch'ü Ch'iupai and Li Li-san. The third, and most damaging, had been that sponsored by Ch'en Shao-yü and Ch'in Pang-hsien (Po Ku) between 1931 and 1934. Ch'en's policies were condemned for having caused the loss of more Communist comrades than enemies.

Ch'en Shao-yü was elected to membership on the Central Committee of the party at its Seventh National Congress in 1945, but it was evident by then that Mao Tse-tung had established himself as the sole orthodox theorist of the Chinese Communist revolution and as the party leader. Ch'en Shao-yü had few responsibilities during the postwar period, though he was identified in 1947 as head of the research department of the Central Committee of the Communist party. When the Central People's Government was established at Peking in October 1949, no substantive responsibilities were assigned Ch'en. He was appointed chairman of the government's commission for legislative affairs and one of four deputy directors of the committee on political and legal affairs of the Government Administration Council. He later was given other marginal posts at Peking.

Ch'en's past record again received sharp official criticism at Peking in July 1951, on the thirtieth anniversary of the Chinese Communist party. In the long essay written on that occasion by Ch'en Po-ta (q.v.), Ch'en Shao-yü was criticized as having been a left deviationist in the early 1930's and a right deviationist in the late 1930's. At the Eighth National Congress of the Chinese Communist party held in September 1956, Ch'en was elected to the new Central Committee, although his political position was indicated by the fact that he was ranked 97th on that 97-man body. After 1956 he was generally inactive, and official propagandists at Peking appeared to have carte blanche in castigating him and his policy lines. In 1929, Ch'en Shao-yü married Meng Ch'ing-shu, who was born at Wuhu in Anhwei province. She joined the Communist Youth League in 1926 and went to Moscow to study at Sun Yat-sen University in 1927. She and Ch'en were married in Moscow. When Ch'en Shaoyü became general secretary of the Chinese Communist party after their return to China, his wife became head of the women's department of the Central Committee at Shanghai. She was again in the Soviet Union with Ch'en from 1932 to 1937. After their return to China, she headed the Yenan Girls College during the greater part of the Japanese war period.