Li Lisan

Li Lisan, photo taken in 1946

Li Lisan with his family in 1966

Li Lisan ( Chinese  (李立三 , Pinyin Lǐ Lìsān ); born November 18, 1899 in Liling as Li Longzhi (李隆 郅); † June 22, 1967 in Beijing ) was a Chinese politician who led the Chinese Communist Party between 1928 and 1930.

Li was born to an impoverished Confucian village teacher in Liling, Hunan Province . He received a modern education in Changsha , during which he met Mao Zedong and Cai Hesen , among others ; He was ashamed of Mao at the time because the latter was much more educated than he was. Like many of his compatriots, he was worried about China's future - it was in a deep state after the fall of the Qing dynasty and because of the threat to its sovereignty from foreign powers social and political crisis. In 1919 he went to France with financial support from the warlord Cheng Qian as part of a worker-student program. There he worked as an assistant to a boiler maker and came into contact with socialist and communist ideology and organized a socialist study group with Zhao Shiyan and Li Bojian , among others . In 1921 he was one of the founders of the Communist Youth League , a forerunner organization of the Chinese Communist Party, along with Zhou Enlai , Cai Hesen and Chen Yi . In the same year he was expelled from France for revolutionary activities and returned to China.

In China, he joined the recently founded Chinese Communist Party and was involved in the trade unions led by Zhang Guotao . He was a good speaker and had a talent for organization. Together with Liu Shaoqi he organized the powerful strikes in the coal mines of Anyuan in 1922, where he recruited numerous new party members. In 1924, the strikes organized by Li led to the mines being temporarily closed. The demonstrations in Shanghai on May 30, 1925 , which resulted in the use of firearms by the English police, several fatalities and the May 30th Movement , were organized by Li Lisan. In 1926, he spent most of his time unionizing in Hubei . In 1927 he was elected to the party's Central Committee at the 5th Congress . After the break of the First United Front , he took part in the Nanchang uprising and fled to Hong Kong after its failure . In December 1927, he succeeded Zhang Tailei , who was killed in the Guangzhou Uprising, as chairman of the Guangdong Party Committee. On the VI. At the Congress, which was held in Moscow in June 1928 for security reasons , Li was re-elected to the Communist Party's Politburo and dominated party politics, although Xiang Zhongfa held the post of General Secretary . As a result, he headed the propaganda department and - contrary to Lenin's teaching - reorganized the party into action committees. In addition, he tried to consolidate his influence in the party and in the Jiangxi Soviet, which has now been established, with the help of his good relations with the Comintern .

As in 1929, the global economic crisis prevailed, Li Lisan believed in an imminent victory of the communist revolution. He tried to get the CP - it had withdrawn from the cities before pressure from the Kuomintang - to concentrate on conquering urban centers again. According to Marxist teachings, Li believed that the proletarian revolution could only be carried out by workers in the cities. The Comintern also criticized the Communist Party for allegedly being too passive. In June 1930 he passed a resolution in the Communist Party Politburo calling for uprisings in some cities and attacks by the Red Army on some other cities - the Li Lisan Line. All these campaigns resulted in severe defeats because the Red Army was too small and poorly equipped. The military leadership of the Red Army - above all Zhu De and Mao Zedong - carried out these orders only reluctantly and withdrew the troops in good time to save them from complete annihilation.

At the end of 1930, the Li-Lisan line came under fire for adventurism and revolutionary dogmatism . In November 1930, after the arrival of Pawel Mif in Shanghai and the return of Zhou Enlai and Qu Qiubai to China, Li lost all posts in the party leadership and in the Chinese Soviet Republic , while Wang Ming held power in the party and Mao Zedong in the military temporarily took over. The main focus was now on securing the communist base areas.

Li was brought to the Soviet Union by the Comintern , held responsible for the CP's defeats in China and punished. It stayed there until 1946. After his return to China - he had been re-elected to the Central Committee the previous year - he first worked in Manchuria , after the founding of the People's Republic of China he was deputy chairman of the all-China trade union federation and minister of labor. From this position he was dismissed in 1951 because he advocated greater independence of the trade unions from the party. During the Cultural Revolution , Li was harassed and tortured by the Red Guards . He died in 1967 under unknown circumstances, possibly he committed suicide. In 1980 he was rehabilitated.

Web links

Commons : Li Lisan  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Alexander V. Pantsov and Steven I. Levine: Mao: The Real Story . Simon & Schuster, New York 2007, ISBN 978-1-4516-5447-9 , pp. 48 .
2. ↑ ^{a b c d} Lawrence R. Sullivan: Historical dictionary of the Chinese Communist Party . Scarecrow Press, Lanham 2012, ISBN 978-0-8108-7470-1 , pp. 157 .
3. ↑ James Z. Gao: Historical dictionary of modern China (1800-1949) . Scarecrow Press, Lanham 2009, ISBN 978-0-8108-4930-3 , pp. 428-429 .
4. ↑ ^{a b c d} Christopher R. Lew and Edwin Pak-wah Leung: Historical dictionary of the Chinese Civil War . 2nd Edition. Scarecrow Press, Lanham 2013, ISBN 978-0-8108-7874-7 , pp. 118-120 .
5. ↑ Dieter Kuhn : The Republic of China from 1912 to 1937 - Draft for a political history of events . 3. Edition. Edition Forum, Heidelberg 2007, ISBN 3-927943-25-8 , p. 325-326 .
6. ↑ ^{a b c d} Peng Deng: Li Lisan . In: Leung, Pak-Wah (Ed.): Political leaders of modern China: a biographical dictionary . 1st edition. Greenwood Press, Westport, Conn. 2002, ISBN 0-313-30216-2 , pp. 85-86 .
7. ↑ Alexander V. Pantsov and Steven I. Levine: Mao: The Real Story . Simon & Schuster, New York 2007, ISBN 978-1-4516-5447-9 , pp. 231 .
8. ↑ Alexander V. Pantsov and Steven I. Levine: Mao: The Real Story . Simon & Schuster, New York 2007, ISBN 978-1-4516-5447-9 , pp. 519 .

Note: This article places the family name before the person's first name. This is the usual order in Chinese. Li is the family name here, Lisan is the first name.