Cheng Fangwu

Cheng Fangwu was a top level Party elder who cut his teeth at the beginning of the long march, responsible for education of the Red Army and the party apparatus from the mid1930s to the end of his life. Earlier in the 1920s he was active as an author of the new literature and a translator.

Cheng Fangwu was born in Xinhua County, Hunan in 1897. He went to Japan in 1910 as a student of Military Science at the Tokyo Imperial University. He returned to China in 1921 and joined the Creation Quarterly circle of scholars, publishing numerous articles promulgating the new literature. He was appointed to the faculty of Sun Yatsen University in Canton in 1924 and also to the Physics faculty at Whampoa Military Academy. He joined the Kuomingtang Party in 1925. Despite the establishment jobs he soon became close to Chou Enlai and Mao Zedong and joined a failed Communist coup dtat. On the government arrest list, Cheng then went in exile to Japan and later Europe, specifically Germany. He mastered the German language and years later authored the direct translation from German to Chinese of Marx and Engels The Communist Manifesto which became texts for the Chinese Communist Party. 1928 he joined the Chinese Communist Party in Paris and published their house journal.

Source: Wikipedia