Li Lisan - Early Years

Early Years

Li was born in Liling, Hunan province in China in 1899, under the name of Li Rongzhi. His father, a teacher, taught Li Chinese traditional poems and classics. In 1915, he arrived at Changsha for high school and saw an advertisement in a newspaper written by a student from First Normal School of Changsha with the pen name 28 Strokes. Li met, and then became friends with, the young man whose real name was Mao Zedong. Later, Li joined the army of a local warlord in Hunan. One of the Division Commanders, Cheng Qian (程潜), who was both Li's father's townsman and alumni, sponsored Li to study in Beijing.

Read more about this topic:  Li Lisan

Famous quotes containing the words early and/or years:

    I could be, I discovered, by turns stern, loving, wise, silly, youthful, aged, racial, universal, indulgent, strict, with a remarkably easy and often cunning detachment ... various ways that an adult, spurred by guilt, by annoyance, by condescension, by loneliness, deals with the prerogatives of power and love.
    —Gerald Early (20th century)

    Uncle Matthew’s four years in France and Italy between 1914 and 1918 had given him no great opinion of foreigners. “Frogs,” he would say, “are slightly better than Huns or Wops, but abroad is unutterably bloody and foreigners are fiends.”
    Nancy Mitford (1904–1973)