Cai Hesen (1895-1931)

Important leader of the Communist Party of China in the early period; Chinese proletarian revolutionary, theorist and propagandist. Courtesy name Run Huan, native of Yongfeng Town, Shuangfeng County, Hunan Province. In 1913, he entered the First Normal School located in the Hunan Province. In the spring of 1914, because the Fourth Normal School was merged into the First Normal School, Cai Hesen met Mao Zedong and they became close friends. In April 1918, Cai Hesen, Mao Zedong and other ambitious young people formally established New People's Study Society in Cai Hesen's family house.

Later, they founded Xiangjiang Review and participated in the May Fourth Movement. In December 1919, he went to France for a work-study program. During his stay in France, he studied Marxist works, carefully studied the experience of the October Revolution in Russia and became a staunch Marxist. In July 1921, Cai Hesen met with members of Engineering World Society to discuss the establishment of the Communist Party and initiated the organization of the European branch of the Chinese Communist Youth League. At the end of 1921, Cai Hesen returned to China and joined the Communist Party of China in Shanghai through the introduction of Chen Duxiu and others. On May 10, 1922, Cai Hesen was elected as executive member of the Central Committee of the First Communist Youth League. He successively served as the editor-in-chief of The Pioneer, the central organ paper of the League, and the editor-in-chief of The Guide, weekly newspaper of the central organ of the CPC Central Committee.

In 1924, Cai Hesen published The History of Social Evolution in Shanghai, which is the first book on the history of social development written by a Chinese from the Marxist materialist view of history. At the end of 1925, he also gave a long speech on the “Development of the History of the CPC” at the Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow. He reviewed in detail the history from the founding of the Communist Party to the Second Enlarged Executive Committee Meeting of the Central Committee in 1925, and made a systematic exposition of the nature of the Chinese revolution, the historical tasks of the Party and the roles of various classes in the revolution, pointing out the dual character of the bourgeoisie, the proletariat as the "leading class of the revolutionary" and the peasantry as the "ally of the working class".

At the August Seventh Conference of the Party in 1927, he strongly recommended Mao Zedong to enter the Political Bureau of the Central Committee and made an important contribution to the Party Central Committee's determination of the correct policy of armed resistance against the reactionary rule of the KMT. In June 1928, he attended the Sixth National Congress of the Communist Party of China in Moscow and was elected member of the Political Bureau and Standing Committee of the CPC Central Committee, and concurrently served as the director of the Publicity Department of the Central Committee. In early 1931, he returned to China to participate in the leadership of the Communist Party of China. In March, he was sent to Guangdong to work as Secretary of the CPC Guangdong and Guangxi Provincial Party Committees. In June 1931, he was arrested in Hong Kong for betrayal and then extradited to Guangzhou by the British Hong Kong authorities. On August 4, 1931, he was executed in Guangzhou Military and Political Prison. He was only 36 years old. His main works are included in Collected Works of Cai Hesen.