Abstract

Chen Duxiu (1879–1942) and Peng Shuzhi (1896–1983) were leading members of the early Chinese Communist Party (CCP); they were both expelled from it as Trotskyists in 1929 and were arrested together in 1932. Though the two men were quite different in temperament and appearance, today book after book on the Chinese Revolution uses a photograph of Peng, looking dashed and dazed at the time of his and Chen's trial by the Guomindang in 1932, in the belief that it is of Chen. The first instance I can find of this mix-up is in the Chinese translation published in Paris in 1973 of Harold Isaacs’ Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution; it was then repeated in more widely available form in a pictorial history of modern China brought out in Hong Kong in 1976 by the pro-Communist Seventies Publishing Company.

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