Inscription for
*The Collected Works of Qu Qiubai*
and Letter to Yang Zhihua[I]
(December 31, 1950)

Comrade Qu Qiubai[2] passed away fifteen years ago. In his lifetime, many people did not understand him, or opposed him, yet his courage to work for the people was never dampened. In the difficult years of the revolution, he held firm to a heroic stand, preferring to walk toward the butcher’s blade rather than submit. This spirit of his in working for the people, this will to face death without yielding, together with the ideas preserved in his writings, will live on forever and never die. Comrade Qu Qiubai was one who was willing to use his mind and think.

[I] Yang Zhihua, wife of Qu Qiubai. At that time she served as Minister of the Women Workers’ Department of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions.

[2] Qu Qiubai (1899–1935), a native of Changzhou, Jiangsu. One of the principal early leaders of the Chinese Communist Party. In August 1927 he presided over the Central Committee Emergency Conference (i.e., the August 7th Conference), which corrected and ended Chen Duxiu’s capitulationism and set the general policy of agrarian revolution and armed resistance against the Kuomintang reactionaries’ policy of massacre. From November 1927 to April 1928 he committed the “Left” putschist error. In September 1930 he presided over the Third Plenum of the Sixth Central Committee, which corrected Li Lisan’s “Left” adventurist error. At the Fourth Plenum of the Sixth Central Committee in January 1931 he was pushed out of the central leadership by Wang Ming’s “Left” dogmatist line. Thereafter, in Shanghai, he engaged in revolutionary cultural work in cooperation with Lu Xun. In 1934 he went to the Central Soviet Area and served as Commissar of Education of the Central Government of the Chinese Soviet Republic. After the Red Army embarked on the Long March, he remained in the Central Soviet Area. In February 1935, while moving from Jiangxi to Fujian, he was arrested by the Kuomintang and heroically died a martyr’s death in Changting, Fujian, on June 18, 1935.