Cheng Fangwu (; August 24, 1897 – 17 May 1984) was a top level Party elder 元老 who cut his teeth at the beginning of the long march, responsible for education of the Chinese Red Army and the party apparatus from the mid-1930s to the end of his life. Earlier in the 1920s he was active as an author of the new literature and a translator. Biography 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 Society circle of scholars with Yu Dafu and other Chinese intellectuals, publishing numerous articles promulgating the new literature. He was appointed to the faculty of Sun Yat-sen University in Canton in 1924 and also to the Physics faculty at Whampoa Military Academy. He joined the Kuomintang Party in 1925. Despite the establishment jobs he soon became close to Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong and joined a failed Communist coup d'état. 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. Cheng returned to China in September 1931 and soon went to Eyuwan (鄂豫皖), a soviet style administered area of about 3 north central Chinese provinces (Hubei, Anhui and Henan). This mountain region was a core Communist power base which they administered entirely. Cheng was the senior commissar responsible for most of the administrative activity, including the economy, education, taxation and transportation. At the second Chinese Soviet Congress in 1934, he was elected to various official positions including the Political Central Committee and to head the Party Education Committee. From then on he was always responsible for the Party education systems as they evolved. Long March and Beyond October 1934 Cheng accompanied the Red Army on its epic Long March. One year later they arrived in the Yan'an caves of northern Shaanxi. Thousands of Chinese youths journeyed to Ya'an following the full scale Japanese invasion of China in 1937. Cheng established the Shaanbei Public Academy which was the official party school reporting directly to the