Chü Chiu-Po

(pen name of Ch’ü Shuang). Born Jan. 29, 1899, in the city of Ch’angchou, Kiangsu Province; died June 18, 1935, in the city of Ch’angt’ing, Fukien Province. Figure in the Communist Party of China (CPC); writer.

The son of a teacher, Ch’ü Chi’iu-po enrolled in the Peking Russian Language Institute in 1917. In 1919 he took part in the anti-imperialist May Fourth Movement. In 1920, Ch’ü joined the editorial staff of the newspaper Ch’enpao, and in 1921 he was sent to Moscow as its correspondent; from there he relayed to China objective information on life in Soviet Russia. In Moscow in 1922 he joined the CPC and took part in the Fourth Congress of the Comintern.

In 1923, Ch’ü was elected a member of the Central Committee of the CPC. He took part in the revolution of 1925–27 in China. In May 1927 he became a member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPC. After the counterrevolutionary coup of Chiang Kaishek and the dissolution of the united front of the CPC and Kuomintang, Ch’ü helped organize an extraordinary meeting of the Central Committee of the CPC, which was convened on Aug. 7, 1927; at the meeting he called on the party to organize an armed struggle against the reactionary forces.

From August 1927 to June 1928, Ch’ü was the general secretary of the Central Committee of the CPC. At the Sixth Congress of the Comintern (1928) he was elected a member of the Executive Committee of the Comintern. From 1928 to 1930 he headed the CPC’s delegation to the Comintern. In 1934 he was named people’s commissar of education of the Provisional Central Government of the Chinese Soviet Republic. On Feb. 23, 1935, Ch’ü was captured in a battle with Kuomintang forces and executed.

Ch’ü wrote many works on the problems of the revolutionary and working-class movements in China, on the achievements of the CPSU, and on socialist construction in the USSR. He translated into Chinese many works by K. Marx, F. Engels, and V. I. Lenin. In his books Travel Notes on the New Russia (1922) and Impressions of the Red Capital (1924), Ch’ü presented the achievement of the October Revolution and recounted his meetings with Lenin and A. V. Lunacharskii. Ch’ü helped acquaint the Chinese people with classical Russian literature through such articles as “On Pushkin’s Tales of Belkin” (1920) and “Russian Literature Before the October Revolution” (1927) and subsequently contributed to an understanding of Soviet Russian literature. He translated works by A. S. Pushkin, N. V. Gogol, N. Iu. Lermontov, F. I. Tiutchev, L. N. Tolstoy, A. P. Chekhov, M. Gorky, Lunacharskii, D. Bednyi, F. V. Gladkov, and P. A. Pavlenko.

Together with Lu Hsün, Ch’ü founded the Chinese League of Left Writers. In his essays “On the Systematization of the History of Chinese Literature” (1932) and “Plekhanov—Theoretician of Literature and Art” (1936), Ch’ü supported the materialist, historical approach to literature, dealt with problems of representing party spirit in art, and called on Chinese writers to study both their own and foreign cultural heritages.