Chen Duxiu (1879-1942) founded the Chinese Communist Party in 1921, after a revolutionary career in the movement that overthrew the Manchus and brought in the Republic. Between his release from prison in 1937 and his death in 1942, he wrote the letters and articles collected in this volume.

Chen Duxiu and the Chinese Trotskyists' legacy for China is that they upheld the standard of urban revolution and socialist democracy, and pointed to a way of releasing Chinese society from the endless chain of repression, risings, and repression. The students who occupied Tian'anmen Square in 1989 drew their inspiration directly from the May Fourth Movement of 1919, which Chen Duxiu led, and echoed many of his later anti-Stalinist proposals. But though the movement that culminated in the massacre of June 4 showed that Chen's legacy still lives, it set back the prospect of a full rehabilitation of the later Chen and his Trotskyist disciples, whose return to limbo symbolises the present blockage of China's evolution toward greater freedom.