Qu Qiubai

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Qu Qiubai (Chinese: 瞿秋白; pinyin: Qū Qiūbái; Wade-Giles: Ch'ü Ch'iu-pai) (January 29, 1899 - June 18, 1935) was born in Changzhou, Jiangsu, China. He was a leader of the Communist Party of China in the late 1920s and important Chinese Marxist writer and thinker.

Qu spent much of his early life in Moscow and was heavily influenced by Stalin. He became acting Chairman of Politburo in 1927 after the fall of Chen Duxiu, thus becoming the de facto leader of the party. He organised revolutions and uprisings such as the Guangzhou Uprising of December 11, 1927.

Qu was arrested and executed by the Kuomintang in 1935. Qu was posthumously heavily criticised as a "renegade" during the Cultural Revolution. The Central Committee absolved him in 1980 and today he is held in very high regard by the Party. Tsi-an Hsia (Traditional Chinese: 夏濟安, Simplified Chinese: 夏济安) writing in The Gate of Darkness: Studies on the Leftist Literary Movement in China (published 1968) described Qu as "the tenderhearted Communist".

Qu was also partially responsible for the development of the Sin Wenz system of Mandarin romanization.

There is a Qu Qiubai museum in his native town of Changzhou.

From its Russian translation, Qu also created the official Chinese translation of The Internationale, used as the anthem of the Communist Party of China.