Comrade Qu Qiubai [1] has been dead for fifteen years.
During his lifetime, many people either failed to understand him or opposed him; yet his courage in working for the people was never broken.
In those difficult years of the revolution, he steadfastly maintained a heroic stance: rather than yield, he chose to walk straight toward the executioner’s blade.
This spirit of serving the people, this unyielding resolve in the face of danger, and the ideas he left behind in his writings will live on forever; they will never die.
Comrade Qu Qiubai was one who thought things through with his mind; he was a man of thought.
The publication of his collected works will be beneficial to the youth and to the cause of the people, particularly in the realm of culture.


Mao Zedong, December 31, 1950. Printed from the manuscript.


Note [1]: Qu Qiubai (1899–1935), native of Changzhou, Jiangsu Province. One of the early principal leaders of the Communist Party of China. In August 1927, he presided over an emergency meeting of the CPC Central Committee—the so-called August 7th Meeting—which corrected and brought to a close Chen Duxiu’s capitulationist line, thereby establishing the general policy of land revolution and armed resistance against the Kuomintang reactionaries’ policy of massacre. From November 1927 to April 1928, he committed errors of “left” adventurism. In September 1930, he convened the Third Plenary Session of the Sixth CPC Central Committee to rectify Li Lisan’s “left” adventurist mistakes. At the Fourth Plenary Session of the Sixth CPC Central Committee in January 1931, he was excluded from the CPC Central Leadership by Wang Ming’s “left” dogmatism. Thereafter, in Shanghai, he collaborated with Lu Xun in the revolutionary cultural movement. In 1934, he went to the Central Soviet Area and served as People’s Commissar for Education of the Central Government of the Chinese Soviet Republic. After the Long March of the Red Army, he remained in the Central Soviet Area. In February 1935, while being transferred from Jiangxi to Fujian, he was arrested by the Kuomintang forces. On June 18, he heroically laid down his life in Changting, Fujian.