Former Site of the Anyuan Workers' Night School

Former Site of the Anyuan Workers' Night School

The Former Site of the Anyuan Workers' Night School is a national key cultural relic protection unit.

The Former Site of the Anyuan Workers' Night School is a key cultural relic protection unit in Jiangxi Province and a red tourism attraction in Pingxiang. It is located on Wufuzhai Lane in Anyuan District, Pingxiang City, Jiangxi Province. The site is a two-story brick-and-wood building covering an area of about 800 square meters, surrounded by an over one-meter-wide eaves corridor.

The Workers' Night School was founded by Li Lisan, one of the figures who made outstanding contributions to the Anyuan workers' movement. Li Lisan (1899–1967), originally named Li Longzhi and also known as Li Nengzhi, was from Liling County, Hunan Province. In 1919, he went to France for work-study, and after returning to Shanghai in September 1921, he was dispatched by the [Party Central Committee] to work in Hunan. Soon after, following Mao Zedong’s instructions, Li Lisan came to Anyuan to begin his work. He set up a civilian school, enrolling around 40 children of workers for free education, and personally taught classes. The funding mainly came from the Labor Secretariat and the Hunan Popular Education Promotion Association. During the school's operation, under the guise of visiting students’ parents, Li Lisan extensively interacted with workers, learned about various aspects of their lives, and promoted the ideas of class unity, struggle, and self-emancipation. He explained that these ideals were socialism, and socialism was the cause of the working class. Through ideological enlightenment and practical engagement, Li Lisan developed a group of Socialist Youth League members and, by the end of 1921, formed a small “workers’ group” consisting of eight members. With the efforts of the group members, in January 1922, the Workers' Night School was established as an annex to the civilian school. Children attended classes during the day, while workers studied at night. After its establishment, the Anyuan Workers' Night School became a base for the Party to carry out ideological education and organizational work among workers. To make the lessons easier for workers to understand and to link teaching activities with the establishment of a workers’ club, Li Lisan tailored his teaching to workers' everyday life issues. He wrote his own teaching materials and explained basic Marxist-Leninist concepts in accessible language, combining class enlightenment with the teaching of cultural knowledge. During the operation of the Workers' Night School, seeing that conditions were ripe for Party building, Li Lisan recruited five advanced members from the Youth League to join the Chinese Communist Party. In February 1922, the Anyuan Railway and Mine Branch of the CCP was established, with six Party members, and Li Lisan served as branch secretary. This was the first Party branch established among China's industrial workers. After the victory of the [1922 strike], the Workers' Night School expanded to seven branches, distributed across Anyuan, Zijia Chong, Xiangdong, Liling, and Zhuzhou.

Pingxiang City, Jiangxi Province