The Return of Li Li-san

The Return of Li Lisan

A portentous figure suddenly reappeared in the top circles of the Chinese Communist Party. He had slipped quietly into Manchuria last fall with the Red Army.

The name of Li Lisan is almost a legend. In the days when the Chinese Communist Party was breast-fed by Moscow (circa 1925), Li Lisan had been the party's No. 1 Marxist and tactical top dog. Then German Communist Heinz Neumann and Georgian Communist M. Lominadze, Comintern agents and personal pets of Stalin, decided to speed up the Chinese revolution by staging an insurrection in Canton (1927). Li Lisan opposed them.

The coup backfired, as Li Lisan had predicted. The Chinese proletariat did not rise in support of the Canton Soviet. Instead, Chiang Kai-shek's troops quickly mopped up the insurrectionists.

But Li Lisan had lost face. His young rivals for party leadership, Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai (until then an executioner for the Communist Party in Shanghai), insisted that the Communists in China should henceforth base their shattered movement on the dissatisfied peasants. Li insisted that it must be based on the factory workers. In a fierce, undercover, dialectic struggle, Li Lisan was forced out of the leadership. He went to Russia, where friends got him a job in Moscow's famed Far Eastern University, training ground for Russia's Asiatic agents. He married a Russian wife. Meanwhile, Neumann and Lominadze were purged and liquidated.

For 14 years Li Lisan was filed away, like Josip Broz (now Yugoslavia's Marshal Tito) and Boleslaw Rutkowski (now Poland's President Bierut), in Moscow's human archives. But last week Li was back in the inner circles of the Yenan Government. Some thought they recognized his dynamic hand already in reports that Yenan was considering superseding the present loose union of local Communist governments with a strong central regime.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.