Editing Chen Duxiu (section)

===Last years===

In 1932, Chen was arrested by the government of the [[Shanghai International Settlement]], where he had been living since 1927, and extradited to Nanjing. In 1933, he was sentenced to 15 years in prison by the Nationalist government, but was released on parole in 1937 after the outbreak of the [[Second Sino-Japanese War]].{{sfn|Chow|2009}}

Chen was one of the few early leaders of the Communist party to survive the turmoil of the 1930s, but he was never able to regain any influence within the party he had founded. For the last decade of his life, he faded into obscurity. 
At the time that he was released, both the supporters of Chen and the pro-Comintern leaders who opposed him had either been killed or had fallen out of favor with the Communist membership. The Chinese Communist Party managed to survive the purges only by fleeing to the northern frontier in the [[Long March]] of 1934–1935, during which Mao Zedong emerged as leader. If only for sheer survival, the Communists had to flee the cities where China's fledgling industrial working class was concentrated, seek refuge in remote rural areas, and there mobilize the support of peasants; this was naturally taken as a vindication of Mao's position in his debate with Chen. Mao and this new generation of Communists would lead the party in China for the next fifty years.

On 23 August, Chen was released from prison and refused multiple offers of positions from the Kuomintang. He said that despite the importance of the war effort, "Chiang Kai-shek killed many of my comrades. He also killed my two sons. He and I are absolutely irreconcilable." In August 1937, Chen met with the heads of the Chinese Communist Party Office in Nanjing. This led to a concerted attempt by Luo Han and [[Ye Jianying]] to allow Chen to return to the Party. In September Mao responded saying that Chen could rejoin the party if he agreed to publicly renounce Trotskyism and express support for the United Front against Japan. Chen responded by letter to the Central Committee of the CCP that he agreed with its line of resistance but would not renounce Trotskyism. This was the end of the last serious attempt to rejoin the CCP.{{sfn|Benton|2017|pp=97–98}}

Chen then travelled from place to place until the summer of 1938, when he arrived at the wartime capital of [[Chongqing]] and took a position teaching at a junior high school. In poor health and with few remaining friends, Chen Duxiu later retired to [[Jiangjin]], a small town west of Chongqing, where he died in 1942 at the age of 62.{{sfn|Chow|2009}} Today, he is buried at his birthplace of Anqing.