Chen Tu-Hsiu (1879-1942) and the Chinese Communist movement

Beschreibung:

Ch'en Tu-hsiu (1879-1942, former Dean of the School of Letters at Peking
University, was the most important leader of the Chinese intellectual
revolution (the May Fourth Movement) and the founder of the Chinese
Communist Party. For more than a decade (1915-1927), he stood out as an
intellectual giant and an undisputable radical revolutionary leader.
Even today, many of Ch'en's original ideas, particularly those of
anti-Confucianism and anti-tradition, are still the very revolutionary
ideologies of the People's Republic of China. Yet, until now, there is
no single scholarly work in any language to provide a comprehensive and
unbiased account of Ch'en's life and activities, his ideas and
personality, and most important, his contributions in later years to the
drastic transformation of China to a modern state in its political,
economic, and social spectra. This book is partly an intellectual and
political biography of Ch'en Tu-Hsui, and partly a study of how Chinese
intellectuals, using Ch'en as a case study, advocated "democracy" and
"science" in the 1910s and 1920s turned to the Communist movement in
order to transform their static country into a modern state, but
eventually perished with their ideas under another revolutionary wave.
This study attempts to establish the interrelationship between the
consciousness of man and the rapidly changing conditions of China in
that period, thereby putting Ch'en in proper perspective, and restoring
him to a place of dignity in the history of Modern China.